


Normalcy and the Take Away Devil

by pprfaith



Series: Road to Morning [3]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Case Fic, Demons, Gen, Mystery, Nightmares, Post Chosen, Psychic Sam, Slayer Powers, Violence, psychic powers, season three
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-03
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-02-03 07:19:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 36,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1735943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Dominion, South Dakota, people are randomly losing that which they hold dear. The brothers and their new tag along investigate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Story related: Part two of the series. Plot is thickening. Or it will be. Further in. Sorry it took me so long to get this up. Job searching is hard work.
> 
> Chapter related: Don't mix booze and painkillers, okay? It's dangerous and un-smart.

+

**Zero**

+

Buffy having a nightmare was unlike anything Sam and Dean had ever witnessed. 

Neither did she scream like Sam, nor kick and toss like Dean. She simply lay in bed, still and tense, every muscle strained to the breaking point, eyes dancing madly behind closed lids. Watching her made their own bodies ache. It was something that both Winchesters had sadly grown used to over the past two weeks.

They had given up on separate rooms after the fourth time one of them had woken to find Buffy sitting at the end of their bed, having snuck in, watching them sleep. It was creepy as hell but more than that, it worried them. The night they had freed the slayer from the Nightmare she had slept little but claimed to be okay. Her sleeping patterns however, had remained much the same ever since. 

She slept one or two hours a night and then woke, refusing to go back to sleep. On the upside, there was always breakfast when the boys woke up, they never ran out of rocksalt shells anymore, and their laundry had a tendency to miraculously get done overnight. Dean had, however, drawn the line at Buffy trying to clean up the inside of his baby. No-one touched the Impala but him. Rule number three in the Dean Winchester Book of Unbreakable Laws. 

So, since Buffy inevitably ended up in their room, whiling the night away with various monotonous tasks, they stopped renting an extra room for her. Either the boys shared and let her have the spare bed, or she crashed with one of them, usually Sam. Although Dean had noticed that she tended to crawl in with him on the nights of a rough hunt, preferring silent companionship over Sam’s attempts at soothing her.

Dean didn’t mind. He’d never admit it, even under the threat of death, but the bottom line was that, despite his aversion to chick flick moments, he was a very tactile person and Buffy’s simple, eye-rolling refusal to give him personal space wasn’t as annoying as he pretended it to be.

Which was how, two weeks and several hundred miles later, Buffy was having a nightmare on one side of the king-sized bed (and hadn’t Dean kicked up a fuss when he’d realized he’d be sharing his bed with not one, but two _bitches_ ) an hour after falling asleep while the boys were sitting at the table, cleaning guns. It was only shortly past nine pm and they were wide awake and talking quietly, giving the exhausted blonde the chance to grab some much needed sleep after she’d more or less crashed as soon as they’d set foot in the room. 

They both stilled as soon as they noticed the change in atmosphere and turned to look at their new friend and yep, there she was, taut as a bowstring ready to snap, lips a thin line, jaw clenched. They waited for a minute or two to see if it would pass, knowing full well it wouldn’t. When had nightmares ever simply stopped? 

Sam finally put aside the revolver he was cleaning and shifted so he could lean across the distance between his chair and the bed and gently said, “Buffy.”

The reaction was instantaneous and creepy. Buffy’s eyes shot open, her breath caught in her throat and she went perfectly still, anticipating an attack. Calmly, Sam waited until reality caught up with her and she relaxed before asking, “What was it this time?”

She sat up, clearing her throat, smiling weakly at them. “Victoria Warden’s worst nightmare was getting lost in the woods,” she informed them, voice flat and sterile. 

“I think I saw her,” Dean supplied as a way to keep the silence at bay. Sam just shrugged. Occasionally the nightmares Buffy had brought back from her time in a coma were familiar but most of the time there were not. They still had no idea just how many people the Nightmare had devoured during its long, hungry existence. All they knew was that some of the dreams it had absorbed, some of the soul pieces that had fed it, seemed to have gotten stuck in Buffy’s head during the two months she had shared her body with the Nightmare. 

Glimpses of lives, memories and dreams, all coming to the forefront whenever she fell asleep. Sam didn’t envy her one bit.

Finally Buffy shook her head, sending her hair flying, shaking off the dream. She put her feet on the floor and asked, “Whatcha doing?”

“Being quiet so you can get your beauty sleep, princess,” Dean drawled, reloading a Glock and setting it aside, safety on. 

She fluttered her lashes at him with fake appreciation meant to cover the real gratitude underneath, and Sam rolled his eyes. Dean picked on him less, now that there was another victim around, but Buffy gave as good as she got and sometimes the two of them just grew a bit much. “Great. So now that I’m awake, what do we do?”

Nightmare talk was officially over, it seemed. Buffy was almost as good at denying and ignoring uncomfortable stuff as a Winchester. She simply looked the other way until it disappeared or jumped her from behind and forced her to face it. 

Healthy? No. Effective? Hell yes. 

“Research?” Sam suggested mildly, knowing he would be shot down before the word left his mouth. 

“Dinner?” Dean made his counter offer, already starting to put away gun oil and pieces of cloth. 

Buffy ran her fingers through her hair, grabbed her favorite knife from the nightstand to tuck it into the waistband of her jeans and stood. “Dinner it is.”

+

It was Dean’s turn to pick what was for dinner and, predictably, he chose the most rundown bar in the entire town and ordered beer and ribs with an eager grin that reminded both Buffy and Sam distinctly of some carnivorous beast. 

Still, the menu was limited to that or burgers and Sam was sure that if he had to eat one more burger this week, he was going to turn round and flat. He copied big brother and ordered the same, Buffy’s variation on the theme came with coke instead of beer and a side of fries.

The waitress taking their order popped her gum and looked the small blonde over doubtfully but didn’t comment on the size of the meal she’d ordered. Dean hid a grin. Buffy ate like a true hunter. A six foot six, three hundred and seventy-five pound hunter. 

“I tried to stick with the average Californian teenage girl amount of food once,” she’d told Sam when he’d finally burst out with the question of how the hell she could eat so much. “You know, fit in, don’t stick out, don’t be a freak. I looked like Mary-Kate Olsen. My metabolism’s taller than me. It’s hell on the wallet, but that’s how it is.”

She’d shrugged and gone back to her third cheeseburger. After two weeks on the road with her, the Winchesters had come up close with most of her quirks and they amused themselves with watching others try and figure the slayer out. Good luck to them. Even knowing about Buffy’s day job and super skills, she sometimes didn’t make much sense.

Like now. She was staring blankly toward the pool tables, chin resting on her hand, yawning. “Hey, Dean?”

“Mhm?”

“Who decided what color the balls are?”

“What?” Dean looked up from the menu he was still studying just for the hell of it and followed her line of vision.

“Who decided what color the pool balls are? I mean, why isn’t there a pink one?”

“Because it wasn’t invented by Barbie?” he suggested, eyebrow raised, menu forgotten in his lap. Sam shrugged off his jacket and leaned back to watch what promised to be an interesting discussion.

“And why aren’t they properly white anyway?”

“They are white.”

“No, they’re not. They’re kinda yellowish. Like bones. Old bones.” She winkled her nose. “I don’t like bones.”

“You’re nuts.”

“And those balls are not white. Plus, those patterns? Totally dizzy.” She made a swirling motion with one finger and yawned again, eyes dropping. But apparently she was still aware enough to duck when Dean tried to smack her with the menu.

“Don’t call my game dizzy.”

She glared while Sam snagged the menu from his brother and promptly smacked him with it for trying to hit a woman, even if it was only with a laminated piece of paper.

“I didn’t. I called the patterns dizzy. They could just as well be… striped. Checkered. Checkered balls look kinda cool, doncha think? All…” Whatever checkered balls were was lost in yet another yawn.

“It’s a classic design, you heathen!” Dean snapped, insulted by her casual disregard of his favorite game. Apart from poker. Dean liked poker. Especially strip poker. But not with Sam. Never again. 

“And don’t you think making the ball that gets to shove around all the other balls white is kinda… racist?”

Dean narrowed his eyes, took a deep breath and got ready to give a very loud and in depth lecture on the beauty that was pool when Sam started giggling his unmanly giggle and Buffy finally cracked and snorted. 

Dean deflated. “Bitches,” he snarled.

“Jerk,” Sam countered, grinning from ear to ear.

Buffy just yawned.

+

Dinner was a mostly silent but comfortable affair and Sam once more marveled at how quickly Buffy had fallen into step with them and they with her. Even with Bobby, the most common companion on their hunts, things were never that effortless, that simple. 

Some of it, he figured, certainly had to do with the fact that Buffy was, hands down, the best hunter there was. She had the instinct, the power, the knowledge, everything. Within the first two days after freeing her from the Nightmare, it had become glaringly obvious that she was an equal player. She had their backs and after watching her singlehandedly trash two demons, they trusted in that. 

Another part was how they had met, smack in the middle of a crisis, inside of something bigger than all of them. In there, in those dreams, things had been… Sam didn’t have words for it, even now, weeks later. Softer. Closer. Clearer. Looking at Buffy, he hadn’t just been able to tell that she was blonde and small and pretty but also that she was brave and tired and a bit worn around the edges, that she was hard when she wanted to be, tireless and lonely. All those things, just by looking at her. And he knew Dean had seen something similar because his brother never trusted anyone he didn’t share genetic material with completely, and sure as hell not after two weeks. But he trusted Buffy. Trusted her enough to not only share a room with her, but a bed and maybe that had to do with how similar the two were, always mouthing off but scared underneath. Pretending not to care and caring so much it hurt, teasing and loving and reckless and brave, addicted to danger and longing for peace and a few screws short of a set.

Sometimes Sam was sure he was seeing double when they started goofing off about the most random things.

But then, in some things, they were fundamentally different, too. For example, Buffy had table manners.

“Dude,” he admonished, “The thing’s already dead. It’s not gonna run away if you slow down and chew.”

His brother swallowed and pointed at him with a greasy rib, “Shaddup,” he said around his next bite. Buffy mimicked gagging and daintily picked at her fries. “You, too, loony.”

“Hey, I resent that!”

“Well, y’re,” he defended his name calling and took a swig of his beer. 

“Am not,” the slayer denied decisively. Just then someone started a new game of pool across the room and at the sound of balls shooting every which way she tilted her head like a curious cat and listened, a funny smile creeping across her face.

“Heard from your sister yet?” He asked, just to shut her up. It had been three days since she’d written Dawn an e-mail and there was no answer as of yet. Her expression dropped for half a second, turning sad, before it returned full blast.

“Nope.” She chirped and giggled until she turned red.

Sam pulled a face and offered a little consoling, “Sorry, but he’s right for once. The lack of sleep is making you kinda… loopy.” At least he wasn’t calling her loony. That had to count for something, right? But the fact remained that she had probably slept less than twenty four hours in the past two weeks and he didn’t care how powerful she was, that kind of thing drove people off cliffs and into wood chippers. 

Buffy righted her head and fixed her gaze on the condensation running down the outside of her glass. “Thanks for that,” she said, tonelessly.

Dean flung his half eaten rib back in the basket, wiped his hands on a few napkins and made a hissing sound, biting at his lip. “You gotta sleep sometime, princess.”

“I know that.” She glared at him and Sam, too, once he nodded. He was all for leaving people to deal with their own nightmares on their own time, but he also knew that they needed to depend on Buffy to have their backs as long as they hunted together and they couldn’t do that if she was more asleep than awake.

“Then why don’t you?” Sam asked before Dean could, knowing he’d phrase the question gentler than his older brother.

“I have pieces of dead people inside my head. Do you have any idea how freaky that is?”

Sam shrugged, nodded and said, “Actually, yeah. It sucks. But you have to sleep before you keel over.”

“In the middle of a hunt,” Dean added, glaring. 

“I don’t need you two to boss me around.”

“No,” Sam countered quickly, “What you need is to sleep for longer than two hours at a time.”

“No shit, Sherlock. Got any secret recipes hidden away?”

“Actually, yeah.” With that Sam stood and marched over to the bar, keeping up the pretense of anger. Truth was, he was more worried than angry. But Buffy was too stubborn to cave under the pressure of worry. Anger on the other hand would piss her off in turn and that, well, he hoped it was going to work. It had to. Dean had threatened knocking her out and Sam could just imagine how well that was going to go.

Once the bartender turned toward him, he ordered three shots of tequila before looking back at his brother and friend at the table and upping the order to ten. Slayer metabolism and the fact that Dean could never stand to let people drink alone figured into his recalculation. The ‘tender nodded and started setting glasses up on a tray. Sam accepted it a moment later, paid, and made his way back.

He set three glasses down in front of his brother, kept only one for himself – someone had to drive – and slammed the other six down in front of the hundred pound slip of a woman glaring mightily at him. Then he dug around his pockets, pulled out a container of painkillers and set four ibuprofen next to the row of glasses.

“That should do the trick,” he commented as he sat back down, putting the tray on the empty seat between them. 

“Painkillers and booze?” she asked, mockingly, “Sam, Sam, Sam. That’s nasty business.”

He shrugged. She was right. Mixing pills and liquor was stupid unless you knew what you were doing and even then, it was unhealthy and dangerous. But unhealthy was better than dead and a lifetime of self-medicating with dangerous injuries had taught him a bit about chemicals. After two weeks of watching Buffy tend her after hunting boo-boos he felt he had a pretty good grip on her metabolism. Which was why he was doping her up like he would his father, who had been about twice her size and three times her weight. Oh well. 

“You need sleep.” He pointed at the row of shots, “If this doesn’t work, we got a crowbar in the car.” Then he put on his serious face and waited.

With a sigh, the blonde reached for the first glass, half-heartedly clacking it against Dean’s as he held it up, and downing it with a grimace and a comical shudder. 

“I really hope I puke all over you,” she informed him and reached for the next shot.

Dean grinned widely and waggled his eyebrows. Sam silently despaired.

+

An hour later Buffy let herself be steered into their motel room with a giggle. Sam was right. Tequila and painkillers were _great_ for getting totally wasted out of her mind. Wow. She wasn’t quite as drunk as the boys seemed to think she was but damn, she was sure flying high. Not quite like being drunk, not really high either. It was like someone had simply switched off gravity and left her to drift. She was completely aware but nothing really mattered. If this kept up, she might actually get some sleep.

Dean sat her down on the only bed in the room, kneeling down to pull off her boots for her. Nice. She patted him on the head. “You’re hot,” she told him, because she wanted to.

He flashed her his best noncommittal grin and drawled, “Don’t I know it.”

Sam sighed somewhere in the background. “Don’t encourage him, Buff.”

She smiled at the nickname. Xander had called her that a few times, but he’d stopped after Angelus had adopted the name. She’d flinched at it for a long time, but not from Sam. Sam was good and goofy and geeky, all nice things with a ‘g’, and he only called her that because he liked her. That was good. 

She watched Dean fling her shoes aside and took that as her cue to start getting ready for bed. She pulled off her shirt, put her knife on the nightstand, and shimmied out of her jeans, leaving her in a tank top and panties. Dean made a low noise at the back of his throat that they all pretended not to hear.

They did that because she was a girl and they were two lonely guys and they slept in one bed and it was better, better to pretend they were all Barbie and Ken dolls, because that meant they didn’t have to eventually scream and cry and break up and hate each other. That meant they were safe.

She crawled into the center of the king sized bed and dropped, already feeling sleep pulling at her. Dean joined her a moment later, Sam a minute after that, both of them stretched out on either side of her. 

One of them switched off the lights, the other pulled up the sheets and then she was warm with one arm across her waist and a back against her side. Safe in a way she hadn’t felt since long, long before the Nightmare.

The arm, the back, the solid warmth on both sides, were reminders that she was real and not alone. Awake. Alive. Not drowning in other people’s nightmares. Buffy rolled onto her side and threw her own arm around Sam, cuddling close. Dean huffed something about girls and sleepovers but closed the new distance between them quietly.

It wasn’t all about her, Buffy knew, even in her new, nebulous state of being. It was about those two idiots on either side of her, too. There was a wall between them, a wall made of a dead mother and a lost girlfriend, of abandonment and loneliness and stubbornness, an absent drill sergeant father, a deal with the devil, and too many old hurts and unspoken things. A wall that seemed impossible to overcome.

But now here she was, right between them, right where the wall was and she lay there along their fault lines, a sort of bridge. Dean wrapped an arm around her and his fingers grazed his brother’s back and Sam smiled in her direction in the dark and accidentally included Dean in his warmth. 

They used her to pass on the things they’d never say, made her their go-between for all the unmanly, weak, chick flick things that ate them alive some days. 

Buffy didn’t mind. She felt their love, their utter devotion to each other as it passed through her and just that, just feeling it, knowing that there were people in the world that loved each other as much as she loved her sister, more even, was good. 

Sam loved Dean and Dean loved Sam and she loved Dawn but Dawn didn’t love her. Not enough to let her go. It made her sad, still, but it was an old ache by now. The Winchesters were more to each other than the Summers women had ever been and she had no doubt that one would follow the other to hell and back, literally. 

And maybe Dawn would write back and things would be a bit okay.

“Night,” Sam finally muttered into the dark and Dean flexed his arm across her waist and sighed happily, something he would deny to the death in daylight.

Buffy just giggled and snuggled down between them, knowing she would sleep without dreaming for once and perfectly okay with the fact that the boys didn’t really need her as much as she needed them.

+


	2. Chapter 2

+

**One**

+

Waking up was a bit less amusing than falling asleep, but as she checked the alarm clock, Buffy figured it was worth it. Eight solid hours of sleep. Can we have a hurrah? Now all she had to do was figure out how to do that trick without the chemical support.

She slipped out the end of the bed, first one awake, as had become routine over the past two weeks. Wow. Two weeks only, since she’d sat with Sam on the Impala’s hood and agreed to travel with them for a while. Just to meet this Bobby guy, who apparently wanted to pick her brain on every question about demonology and magic that he’d had to leave unanswered in the past thirty odd years. It sounded like fun times. 

Since then they’d dealt with three ghosts, one poltergeist, several random vamps, one werewolf, a pack of black dogs and one cursed object – a shoe, of all possible things. Not all that much to write home about, not all that long, but to her, it felt like forever. The three of them had fallen into patterns so easily, so effortlessly, it was like things were meant to be this way. Not that she was going to say that out loud. She’d just jinx herself and Dean would never, ever let her live it down if she did. 

But maybe… star, cross and dirt dangling around her neck. The connection Dean had forged with it, the faraway look Sam had gotten on his face when she’d told him about heaven, Dean being bound for hell. All those things, all those pieces, fit together somehow. She just hadn’t figured out how yet. But she would.

Until then, breakfast sounded like a great idea. She could do with a galleon of OJ, maybe two. She found her jeans on the floor on Dean’s side of the bed and slipped them on, followed by her shoes. Her shirt had somehow managed to disappear completely overnight and with two hunters set on a hair trigger sleeping just behind her, she couldn’t exactly turn the room inside out to find it. The only reason those two lumps weren’t awake yet was that they had gotten used to a third hanging out. Maybe it was a remnant from when they’d hunted with their dad, but they barely stirred when she haunted their rooms late at night.

She snagged Sam’s button down from the chair he’d thrown it over and pulled it over her tank top, rolling up the sleeves about half a mile. Then she tucked her knife back where it belonged and grabbed her wallet, letting herself out of the room into the early morning sun. 

Double wow. It’d actually been awhile since she’d slept not only till dawn, but beyond it. Sam sure knew how to knock a girl out.

+

Dean was just finishing getting dressed when Buffy returned with coffee, pastries and a small stack of printouts in hand.

“The café down the street has web access,” she informed them by way of greeting. Sam merely grunted and went straight for the coffee. 

Dean snatched a donut and asked, “What you got?”

She licked at the icing of her own donut as she sat down in one of the two standard rickety motel chairs. “Guy going spontaneously blind in Dominion, South Dakota.”

“Sounds…,” Sam trailed off, not actually knowing what it sounded like. People didn’t just go blind for no reason. He reached for the newspaper articles Buffy had printed from the internet and scanned them, drinking his coffee absentmindedly. 

Dean rolled his eyes at his geek of a brother and turned to their companion. “Sleep okay?”

He wasn’t asking how she’d slept. Really. He just wanted to know if she was going to zone out on them in the middle of a hunt. Just protecting his own and Sammy’s asses. That was his job. And Buffy, well, she knew that. She had a little sister and she’d died for her once, literally. She understood what it meant to be an older sibling. Dean needed her to be sharp so he could look after Sam without worrying. 

That was all. 

As long as they could both convince themselves of that, they’d be just fine. 

“Eight hours straight,” she confirmed, meeting his probing gaze evenly. Good. That was good.

Now, back to the blind guy in…, “Hold on, did you say Dominion?”

She nodded, raising one eyebrow in silent question as he abruptly stood and went over to his duffel, digging through it until he found the stack of old newspapers he kept lugging around. He dug through them until he found the one he was looking for, marked with a quickly scrawled _South Dakota_ across the top of the front page. He unfolded it and opened it at the very back where the trash usually was. It was probably a sad thing that that was where most of their jobs came from.

He scanned the page for a moment before stabbing at it with one finger. “Here,” he told his captive audience. “Peter Mitchell forgot how to read in his sleep. Author of travel books devastated blah, blah. Doctors suspect brain tumor, blah, blah, results inconclusive. Blah. Guess where good old Pete forgot how to put letters together?”

Sam sat down his coffee and took a wild guess. “Dominion, South Dakota?”

“Yep.”

“The guy who went blind is a painter. Well, was, actually.”

“Hard to draw when you can’t see those landscapes anymore,” Dean agreed, earning himself a glare from his bleeding heart of a brother. What? It was true. 

“So we got writers forgetting how to read and painters going blind? All in one place?”

Sam grunted. “We’ll never make it to Bobby’s at this rate,” he informed the room at large and stood to pack. South Dakota was at least a seven hour drive away. 

“It’s the right state at least,” Dean reminded his little brother, mostly so he’d get the last word and reached for the coffee. He did have a point though. They’d been zigzagging towards and away from Bobby’s place for the past two weeks, never quite managing to get there before another hunt reared its head and they had to detour again because lives were at stake. And when it wasn’t a hunt, one of Buffy’s contacts called and they ended up watching as she took out vampire nests like they were ant hills.

Helluva impressive to watch, but not conductive to getting where they were going. Iowa was as close to Bobby as they’d managed to get since they’d set out toward the old man. 

Maybe they’d get there this time. Third time lucky, right? Idly, Dean wondered if three times three plus another few threes still counted as third time.

+

As had quickly become habit, Dean led the way in the Impala and Buffy followed in her Mustang because her map reading skills were somewhat lacking, by her own admission. Google Maps was not her friend, she’d told the boys and then wondered why exactly Sam bumped his brother and spent the next twenty minutes muttering under his breath about technology-impaired hooligans.

Sam rode with his brother for the first five hours before switching during a coffee break. Officially he went to keep an eye on the slayer because one night of proper sleep didn’t make up for two weeks of practically no sleep at all. Unofficially he just had to get out of earshot of Dean’s Best of Metallica tape before he lost it and hurt it and its owner.

They finally pulled into the parking lot of a random motel that looked exactly like all the others they’d ever been to, except that there was a different Disney movie theme for each room. It was Buffy’s turn to spring for the room and because she had better funds than them – which didn’t exactly take much, but they had their pride – she went for one of the family rooms they boasted.

“Circle of life,” Sam commented as he took in the Lion King theme, wondering, not for the first time, how the hell his brother found these mad places. He suspected that Dean had his very own brand of psychic bullshit going on, only a very specific one. One that led him to greasy diners, sleazy bars and crazy motels with an accuracy that topped almost anything else, safely circumnavigating all places that sold healthy food, had respectable waitresses and didn’t decorate like LSD had never gone out of style.

“Don’t let the warthog bite,” the brother in question suggested, claiming the side of the king sized bed that was closer to the door, as always. Buffy rolled her eyes at both of them, squeezed past the fake palm tree next to the door and flung her bag on what was obviously the ‘kiddy bed’ against the far wall. 

She let herself fall backward across the ugly jungle bedspread, grimaced and reached under herself to pull out a stuffed animal. “What was this guy called?” she asked.

Dean squinted at the animal. “That a squirrel?”

“Dude, there are no squirrels in the jungle,” Sam corrected, rolling his eyes.

“That’s a squirrel.”

Buffy pulled the thing closer to take a look at it and scrunched up her nose as she got a whiff of it. “Do squirrels generally smell of vomit?”

“No squirrels in the jungle,” Sam repeated adamantly, watching as the not-squirrel sailed past his head toward the metal trashcan and hit it with a resounding _bang_ and a _swish_.

“No lions either,” Dean countered.

“Are too,” Sam snapped an immediately regretted it. He knew what was going to happen now.

“Are not,” Dean threw right back, smirking, happy in the knowledge that he’d pulled college boy down to his level.

“Are too.” 

“Are not.”

“Are too.”

“Are not.”

“Timon.”

Both boys blinked at the slayer stupidly, “What?”

“I remembered the guy’s name. It’s Timon. I think my little sister made me watch it about two dozen times before I managed to accidentally on purpose drench the tape in OJ. I was probably repressing.” 

“So what is it?”

“What’s what?”

“That thing. What is it?” Dean demanded, pointing at the stuffed animal peering sadly over the rim of the trashcan. He nudged it with the toe of one boot, like it might suddenly come to life and eat him.

Sam crossed his arms over his chest. “So you’re admitting it’s not a squirrel?”

His brother rounded on him, finger raised, mouth open to snap something insulting at him and then stopped, drooping. “Damn,” he admitted, arm sinking.

Then, “Dude, is that a _bug_ wallpaper?”

+

By unanimous vote they showered one after the other and then fled the room, vowing not to come back before full dark when they could leave the lights off and not have to look at the décor. And the creepy bugs. They hated bugs, all three of them. Sam and Dean did since they’d almost gotten killed by bee because of an ancient curse and Buffy just muttered something about the maggot man and shuddered all over. 

Dean used his psychic powers to the best of his abilities and found them a bar. Although, Sam suspected, his brother’s GPS of weird was a bit off, because the place was actually kind of decent. It was the old school kind of place, that served real food, and allowed you to bring your kids and teach them darts or pool. The boys had spent most of their childhood in places like that, before they’d started slowly dying out. The places, not the Winchesters. Although there was a definite and constant decline in their numbers as well. And Dean… Dean had only ten months and some change now.

Ten months. That’s how long it took for a baby to be born, Sam remembered. Not nine months like people always said but really closer to ten. Jessica had told him that once, when they’d been tipsy and dreaming of a future with a house and a dog and children and now…

Dean had only ten months to live.

Sam looked at his brother as he climbed out of the Mustang, discussing music with Buffy, who was leaning against the hood of the car already, arms crossed, ready to get into another pointless argument. They had told her a week ago, more by accident than design, what Dean had done. His soul for his brother.

All the slayer had done was nod and ask for an exact recitation of the deal. 

“At least you’re not calling me stupid,” Dean had remarked off handedly, remembering that conversation with Bobby that Sam had not yet managed to drag out of him in its entirety.

Buffy had laughed and humorlessly told them, “I jumped off a hundred foot tower once to save my sister. I saved the world too, but I did it for her. Pot and kettle, Dean.”

But unlike Dean, Buffy had gone to heaven instead of hell. She’d been at peace. Dean hadn’t just sold his life, he’d sold his eternity, signed it away for a brother who had left him, had hurt him, had spent so much of his life being a nag. And still he’d done it. 

Buffy’s quiet acceptance of the deal, the look she shared with Dean, that look of utter understanding, the way she simply nodded, moved on, tried to help find a way out of the deal, that was probably the biggest reason they had both taken to her so fast. Sam and Dean had met a lot of people in their lives, too many to count. But few of them, if any, had looked at them and simply accepted all they saw, all there was to them. 

Buffy ribbed and snarked and threw things at them but she didn’t judge. Not ever.

Feeling sentimental after his little mental excursion, and well aware that Dean would demand to feel his temperature if he took it out on him, Sam slung an arm around Buffy’s shoulders and led her inside the bar and toward an empty table at the back, Dean trailing after them like a lost puppy.

They sat and the slayer handed out the menus tucked away between the shakers, looking them over in awe. “They have things that aren’t made of grease,” she breathed. 

Dean groaned dramatically, but got sidetracked by the buxom waitress weaving towards them. She came to a halt right in front of him, smiling widely, hip-shot as she checked him out in a painfully obvious way. “Hey there, sugar. What can I get ya?”

Dean smiled right back and offered, “Oh, I know a few things you can get me, Andy.” He read the last off the name tag pinned to her top. Andy licked her lips, giggled, and started playing with her necklace. Hook, line and sinker. Or was that hook _er_?

“I’ll have a beer and the chicken, thanks,” Sam interrupted the foreplay with a defeated roll of his eyes. Unfortunately, this wasn’t even the cheapest display of lust at first sight that his brother had put on recently. Since the clock was ticking down, Dean had risen to new heights of promiscuity that astounded even the one who’d literally known him all his life. 

Andy jerked slightly, as if noticing for the first time that there were others sitting at the table with her chosen prey. She snatched a pen out of the pocket of her tighttight jeans and jotted down the order, turning to Buffy next with a critical gaze. Assessing the competition. The blonde just dimpled at the taller woman and waited until she was finished before placing her own order. 

All three of them watched Andy leave. Or rather, Sam and Buffy watched her leave while Dean watched her butt. Sam kicked him in the shin under the table, earning himself a smack upside the head in return.

“Back in five,” their companion suddenly announced, standing and heading for the bathrooms at the back of the room, leaving the boys alone.

“You gonna take her up on her offer?” Sam asked, more out of idle curiosity than anything else. He was honestly surprised when his brother shrugged and then half shook his head.

“Nah.”

“Why not?”

“Why should I?”

Okay. “Christo.”

“Very funny, Sam. Seriously, dude, I don’t bang every woman I meet. I have some restraint.”

“Since when?” The answer followed hot on the question’s heels. Since Hollow Springs, Colorado.

Sam’s sly expression at getting a chance to tease his brother faded as the realization hit him. Dean hadn’t taken a girl home – or what constituted as home - since they’d met Buffy. “Tell me you’re not….”

Not what? Crushing on her? Did Dean even know what a crush was? Had he ever…? No, that was the wrong question. Sam knew his brother better than that, knew that Dean wasn’t all about the sex. He was about people, too. Saving people. Helping them in some small ways. He could be a vindictive bastard but he had also, on more than one occasion, picked up a dropped can in a supermarket, or helped get a ball out of a tree.

And right now, he just sat there, watching with an amused glint in his eyes, like he knew exactly which way Sam’s thoughts were turning. “I’m not,” he quietly denied before his smile grew wicked, “Are you?”

Was he? Not really. Maybe a bit. About as much as Dean. “No.”

This time Dean laughed out loud, disbelieving, “Seriously, dude. She’s been cuddling up to us for the past two weeks. If there’s anything in your pants at all….”

He trailed off, not needing to finish his sentence for his meaning to be clear. Buffy was close. Closer than they’d been to a woman, any woman, in forever. It wasn’t sex and goodbye. It was sharing a shower and a bathroom and a bed and just generally space. Living next to each other. Buffy left her hair-ties everywhere with stray hairs dangling from them in rather unappetizing little tangles. She showered too hot and then closed the bathroom door so everything inside grew damp and stayed that way. Sam hadn’t known all those things about anyone but Dean in a long time and now here was a real, life-sized woman. Simply by virtue of proximity, Buffy had inserted herself into their lives.

And their minds. Because even if they’d rather die than say it out loud, they were both crushing on her. Just a bit. Just for a while.

“You plan on doing anything about it?” Sam asked, already knowing the answer. 

“Nope. You done your training yet today?” 

Subject change. Okay. Sam could roll with that. He shook his head and rolled his eyes, knowing what was coming. Dean pulled the salt shaker to the middle of the table and cheered his baby brother on, “Go get’ em, tiger.”

After their discovery that Sam’s abilities hadn’t actually died with the yellow-eyed demon, they had spent a few days ignoring the facts before Buffy had insisted that untrained psychics were worse than trained ones and taught Sam a few meditation techniques. She couldn’t do much more than that, since her own visions were different from Sam’s and she had no other talents in that area, but it helped and he’d been stubbornly practicing with her encouragement ever since. Dean had mostly sat on the sidelines, watching indulgently and sometimes amusedly.

Now he grinned widely as Sam glared full throttle at the shaker and willed it to _move_. It jerked in place, slid about an inch forward and then fell, spilling salt all over the table. 

“Cool.”

Sam brushed the salt to the floor, threw some over his shoulder, and shook his head. “Dude, I thought you didn’t like me using this stuff?”

A shrug. “It’s a weapon, Sam. I sleep better knowing you won’t pull the trigger in your sleep. Sides, we can use this.”

“Use what?” Buffy asked as she returned to their table, slipping past Sam’s back to reach her chair.

“Use his _Shining_ ,” the older brother replied nonchalantly.

“Man, I can barely move the shaker,” the younger cautioned. “That’s not exactly dangerous.”

“It’s salt,” was all Dean had to say on the matter. Andy returned with their drinks then, bending at the waist to put down the tray, brushing her hand down his arm and tucking something into his hand with a coy smile. 

Buffy made a gagging noise and covered it with a cough when the taller woman glared her way. Dean just smiled and tucked the number away in the pocket of his jeans before returning the salt to its proper place and passing Buffy’s drink on to her.

“Dinner won’t be a minute,” Andy told them with fake cheer and swayed off again, shaking her hips for all they were worth. 

“Honestly,” Buffy asked after a moment of contemplative silence. “Do you actually find her hot?”

Dean ran his tongue along his teeth and waggled his eyebrows. 

“She’s like… plastic and air.”

“Don’t forget the make-up,” Sam reminded, solemn expression on his face.

“Pretty colors,” the slayer agreed.

The victim of their scorn ostensibly scratched his nose with his middle finger. “Bitches.”

“Jerk.”

Buffy flicked the cap of Sam’s beer at him and leaned back in her seat, enjoying the simple routine they’d somehow established in a few short weeks.

+


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the postus interruptus. I was on holiday. Our regularly scheduled programme should now resume.

+

**Two**

+

After dinner, Dean went to hustle some poor schmuck out of their hard-earned money and Buffy hit the jukebox and then the small dance floor at the far corner of the bar, which was mostly populated by teenagers trying to have a good time in a town too small for a Starbucks. Sam, never much of a party person, remained behind at the table with their research. His laptop was open in front of him, recent newspaper articles glaring at him in black on white. 

He read for a while, tried to find a connection between the two victims, to figure out what was doing this. When he got too frustrated with that, he angled the computer to block sight of the bit of table directly in front of him and placed the salt shaker there, framed by his hands. Then he willed it to move. He concentrated on his breathing, went to that place Buffy had shown him, the place from where he could recognize the _feel_ of people approaching him long before they said or did anything. It heightened his senses and proved once and for all that there were indeed more than five. 

The first time he’d managed to reach this state, Dean had been in the shower doing things that Sam would have preferred to never feel coming from his big brother. When he’d jerked back to awareness and almost fallen of the bed in surprise, Buffy had caught him and laughed in his face, knowing perfectly well what had happened. It made Sam glad that she was the one with super senses and no off switch, instead of him. 

He went to that place now, focused his entire being on that damn salt shaker and told it, _left_. It went, crashing into the palm of his hand, hard enough to rebound a bit. He quickly closed his fingers around it and put it back in the middle. 

_Right_.

This time, the velocity was better. Slower. More control. He kept shooting the shaker from left to right and back, mentally calculating how long it would take him until he could do any _useful_ tricks. The answer, of course, was: too damn long. Okay, so maybe he could fling things at the bad guys. Like rocks. Very small rocks. With about a fifty percent chance of hitting. Except that most of what they hunted wasn’t corporeal and the rest didn’t give a flying fig about rocks. Besides, he had yet to test distance. For all he knew, he could only move something about a foot before it dropped and went back to being useless. He’d have to try that. Target practice for the psychic kid. 

God, Dean would get a kick out of this. Either that, or he’d finally remember that he was dead against stuff like that and hate Sam for being a freak. 

Speaking of, Sam turned to check that his brother wasn’t about to get into yet another bar fight with some dumb hillbillies and breathed a sigh of relief when he found everyone around the pool table relaxed and amicably tipsy. Everyone except Dean.

He stood straight, clutching his cue, expression hard, bordering on dangerous, and his gaze fixed on the dance floor. Which was where Buffy was. Immediately, Sam’s head swiveled around to check on her.

She wasn’t dancing anymore. 

Instead she stood at the edge of the dance floor, looking annoyed as a blonde guy in designer jeans crowded her with a leer on his face. Her body language was danger and the glint in her eyes death but the idiot only saw _female_ and _meat_ and nothing more. He was too dumb to realize he was cornering a predator and likely to get himself hurt very soon. 

The only reason, Sam knew, that the guy wasn’t currently sobbing his horny little heart out on the floor with a broken wrist or two was that they were at the beginning of a hunt and getting kicked out of town wouldn’t do. 

Time to show the idiot the kind of danger he understood. Sam stood the same moment Dean dropped his cue on the table, forfeiting the game and they both moved across the room the way their father had taught them. Grace and danger, power and gun oil poured into a human body. Hunters. 

And as they usually did, people slid to the wayside as they passed, not even noticing they did it. If someone came toward them with a purpose and a direction, the sheep always scattered. 

The guy stepped a bit closer to Buffy and put a very heavy and unwelcome hand on her shoulder in an out of place gesture. Almost like he was patting her. What the hell?

Dean reached Buffy first, just as the guy tried to slide his other hand around her hip and under her shirt. Sam watched in slow motion as she reached for his wrist, her smile all teeth now. Hunt or not, there was going to be trouble now.

Sam wondered how they were going to explain a hundred pound soaking wet super ninja to the cops. Then Dean’s fist went flying and so did the idiot who thought he could grope women – this woman! – without their consent.

The guy landed in a heap, clutching his jaw and swallowing. He’d probably bitten his cheek. Sam put a hand on Buffy’s shoulder, knowing it looked like he was consoling her. The crowd didn’t need to know he was restraining her. That and he sort of felt the need to wipe the guy’s touch from where he’d parked his hand. Dean stood over the groper and coldly informed him, “No means no, asshole.”

By the time he turned toward them, Buffy had her homicidal urges well under control and pouted prettily, “I wanted to hit him.”

Dean flashed his killer smile and offered an insincere, “Sorry, princess. Didn’t mean to ruin your fun.”

Around them, the impromptu crowd dispersed and Sam noticed with some pleasure that no-one bothered helping the blond up from the floor. Not very well liked, was he?

He was about to suggest they call it a night before they riled up more locals when Andy, the waitress, pushed toward them. Instead of going straight for Dean like before, she grabbed Buffy’s hand in a typical gesture of shared female distress. Buffy, who was neither typical nor distressed, tried to extract her hand without success.

“Oh honey, are you alright? Jake didn’t do anything, did he?”

The slayer shook her head and finally reclaimed her lost limb with a little jerk. “I’m fine. Got my two knights in slightly dented armor.” She waved at the brothers, stuck her tongue out at their indignant expressions and then quickly added, “But maybe it’s best if we go now. We had a long drive today.”

Andy nodded, all understanding and concern and Sam decided that she was pretty when she wasn’t desperately advertising too much of herself. And she seemed kind, too. 

Behind Dean, the idiot – Jake – stumbled a bit as he came to his feet and bumped into Dean, immediately causing the hunter to tense up and get ready for another round. But like he’d done with Buffy, Jake merely lay a hand on his shoulder, steadying himself. He patted it once and then retreated, a sneer on his face until he reached his beer at the bar and washed away the humiliation.

Dean stood very still for another moment, before rolling his left shoulder as if the touch had caused him physical discomfort. “How the hell do you always find those flakes?” he demanded of Buffy, without heat.

The blonde shrugged innocently and Dean felt the need to add, “He groped me.”

Sam nodded, shrugging. So Jake was weird and had a tendency to pat people who had just fed him his teeth. There wasn’t much they could do about it. 

Buffy accompanied Sam back to the table to collect their things and pay the bill while Dean made his apologies at the pool table. But the grizzled men he’d been playing had watched his heroics and apparently thought that chivalry was no reason to forfeit a game, so Buffy and Sam had to wait twenty minutes for Dean to finish wiping the floor with them. He collected more than two hundred bucks, leaving two twenties behind to keep the peace and maybe grease some brains, in case they needed information later on. 

He was in such a good mood that he pestered Buffy until she turned over the keys to the Mustang, letting him drive. Officially, Dean was learning to handle the slayer’s car in case she got knocked out and they needed to make a quick getaway, someday. Privately Sam was sure his brother just got a kick out of driving an old, powerful and super-tuned machine that could kill him as easily as a gun to the head if he wasn’t careful. But he still loved his baby best.

Either way, Dean had fun as the turned down the windows and whooped into the night air and neither Buffy nor Sam had the heart to shut him up.

+

Waking up without needing to be woken was not actually a new thing for Dean. It happening before noon, however, was. He stifled a groan as he rolled out of bed, glaring at the clock that dared tell him that it was only eight in the morning. Behind him, Sam was happily drooling away, oblivious to the world and hogging the blankets again.

Buffy’s bed against the far wall was empty but rumpled, so she’d slept at least a few hours. There were a few demonology books spread across the table in the corner, meaning she’d probably spent the rest of the night researching some monster or another. He could hear the shower so that was out. Instead he stood and pulled on his jeans and leather jacket, not bothering to tie his boots properly. He just stuffed the laces into the tops and figured it would hold until he got a hold of coffee. If anything attacked him before that, he’d just shoot and hope for the best because he sure as hell was too tired to do any running anyway. End of story.

He grabbed some of his winnings from the night before and his keys and let himself out as quietly as possible. They were on the first floor - the better to make a quick getaway - and he ambled along the wraparound porch without looking where he was going until he reached the two stairs leading down into the parking lot. To the left, where the Impala was parked and he jiggled the keys in a wordless greeting to the old girl before looking up and….

“Fuck!”

He spun in a circle, suddenly wide awake, scanning the entire parking lot. 

“Where the fuck is my car?!”

He did a sweep of the entire lot. Twice. No Impala. Not even tracks of the Impala. Nothing. Clenching his jaw, he felt a tick start in his left temple. If Sam was starting the prank wars up again, there were going to be bodies. 

Seriously. Mess with him, mess with his stuff, his weapons, his damn _life_. But do not mess with his freaking car! His baby!

He jogged back to the room, slamming open the door and barking, “Where is she, Sam?”

Sam shot wide awake immediately, hand going to the gun he kept under the pillow before he registered his brother and not a monster was standing in the doorway. “What the hell, man?”

“ _Where is she_?”

“Buffy? Dunno. Have you checked the bathroom?” He dropped the gun on the nightstand and rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Why are you yellin’?”

“Not Buffy. My car. Where. Is. She?”

Sam dropped his hands, eyes going wide. “What?”

“I said,” Dean yelled and damn the neighbors, “Where the hell did you put my car, Sammy?!”

Hands raised, backing down, expression confused. “I don’t know, man. I didn’t do anything. I _swear_.”

Dean slumped. Problem was, Sam could con the whole wide world with his innocent little boy looks and those dimples, but Dean had taught him how and he knew when his little brother was lying. And he wasn’t. 

Which meant….

“Someone stole the Impala.”

“That’s impossible,” Sam argued, disbelief coloring his voice. Buffy finally turned off the shower and poked her head out the door, taking in both their expressions.

“What’s wrong?”

“The ‘pala’s gone.”

She stepped out of the bathroom, clutching her towel to her chest and knew that something was seriously Not Right when Dean didn’t stop to check out her legs. “Gone as in….”

“Gone. Disappeared. The Great Escape. Stolen. Hasta la vista, baby. Poof. _Gone_.” He threw both hands in the air to illustrate his point and felt a bit like crying. It wasn’t just the car. That car had belonged to his parents. Mom. Dad. Both gone. He had spent most of his life in that car, had learned most of what he knew in the passenger seat, had raised Sammy in the backseat on Lucky Charms and Dr. Pepper. The Trunk contained all their weapons, their books, most of their clothes. Everything they owned except for their overnight bags, everything they were and needed. Their whole freaking lives where in that car, hell, _were_ that car.

And now it was _gone_.

Buffy hurriedly grabbed a bundle of clothes and disappeared back into the bathroom to get ready for action. Sam stood and simply jumped back into his jeans. Dean came to one very simple conclusion. “I’m going to kill whoever did this.”

Sam winced at the homicidal tone and cautioned, “Dean, relax. We gotta think this through.”

“Think? They got my baby, Sam. And the trunk. We gotta get her back before they pop the trunk.”

And to do that… “We gotta call the police.”

“Woah!” Sam was there suddenly, his Sasquatch hands on his brother’s shoulders. “Chill. We can’t call the police.”

“Of course we can. My car was stolen. My _car_ , Sammy.”

Okay, so maybe he was whining. It was his _car_. The only person in his entire life that had never left him. Or let him down. Or hurt him. So she wasn’t a person at all, but who cared? He’d soaked that thing in his own blood, almost died in all four seats.

His _car_. 

“And what do we tell them? In case you forgot, you’re wanted for murder, Dean. Reporting a missing ’67 Chevy Impala is as good as turning yourself in. It’s gonna raise every flag between here and Henriksen’s office. No police. We gotta solve this ourselves.”

“How?”

Sam took a breath and held it, obviously thinking and not coming up with anything. Great. Just great. Solve this on their own. Yeah, right. Luckily, Buffy chose that moment to come out of the bathroom again, dressed and brushing her wet hair.

“Security tapes,” she said. “Check if the motel’s got any and if yes, get a look at them.”

“Right,” Sam straightened. “I’ll do that. Dean, stay here. Calm down. Think if anyone admired the car last night, or something.”

Or something. _Right_. God, sometimes Sam treated him like a retarded child. But he was a good brother and stayed right where he stood, letting little brother do the legwork while he fretted. 

“What if they take her apart? What if they open the trunk and find all our shit and rob a bank? What if they turn her in to the police? I’ll never see her again. Never. They’ll… they’ll lock her away somewhere to see if I come for her and I won’t be able to because Henriksen is that big of an asshole and then-“

“Dean,” the slayer snapped, flinging her brush on the bed. “Breathe. It’s gonna be okay.”

“It’s my _car_.”

“I know that. I love my car, too. But you gotta stop whining like a five-year-old.”

“My _car_!”

“Dean!” she repeated, tone warning. Buffy tolerated a lot of annoying habits, but whining drove her up the wall like little else. Usually, Dean was smart enough to avoid her wrath when it was as simple as not whining. Not that he ever usually whined. At all. But this was his car, damnit. 

“My _baby_.”

Buffy punched him in the arm. Hard. He flinched and brought a hand up to rub at the spot, glaring and opening to his mouth to protest the treatment before stopping short. 

And blinking. 

He twisted to look at his arm and experimentally poked himself. No screaming, slayer-punch induced agony.

“That didn’t hurt,” he informed his companion.

“If you wanna pick a fight, find Sam,” Buffy told him, hands on hips.

He shook his head. “No, seriously. That didn’t hurt. Usually I’d be bruising by now.” He poked the spot again for illustration and didn’t flinch. Instead he narrowed his eyes at her. “You going all weak and powerless on me?”

She scowled and simply hit him again. He wanted more? He could have more. 

Only it didn’t hurt. Not any more than when Jo or maybe Lisa punched him. It was a regular girl punch. Dean pushed the worry for his car aside for a second and ordered, “Push me.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Come on.”

She rolled her eyes, obviously annoyed, but humored him, if only because she knew he wouldn’t shut up before she did. She put her palms flat again his pecs and pushed. He didn’t budge. 

She pushed harder. He still didn’t budge.

Frowning, Buffy pulled back and shoved him as hard as she could, a move that should have sent him through the wall straight into the parking lot. He took half a step backwards to balance himself, but that was all.

Wrong.

Something was very, freaking wrong. Slowly, Buffy pulled back her arms and inspected her palms, as if the answer lay in the point of contact. 

Dean watched her as she studied her hands, looking very small all of a sudden. Suddenly she spun on her heel, marched over to her bed, grabbed one of the bedposts and jerked. Yesterday, the motion would have resulted in a broken bed. Now all it did was hurt her. She let go of the bed to clutch at her left wrist, an expression of pain on her face.

“Dean?” she asked, sounding all of twelve years old. “What’s happening to me?”

+


	4. Chapter 4

+

**Three**

+

Sam sweet talked the clerk, greased the owner up with fifty dollars and thanked God that the man had a geeky son that insisted on state-of-the-art surveillance for the family business. 

Thirty minutes later he returned to the Lion King room with a small bounce in his step because while he hadn’t miraculously tripped over the Impala on the way back, he had found out one very important fact.

“I got good news and bad,” he announced as soon as he stepped into the room, fully expecting his brother to jump him and shake the information out of him. Instead the only answer he received was a grunt from Dean who was leaning against the wall next to the window, looking like he wanted to be anywhere but here. 

No, hold on, that wasn’t it. Dean wasn’t uncomfortable. He was… clueless? Automatically, Sam’s gaze swept through the room, looking for the source of his brother’s strange behavior and coming to a halt on Buffy, who sat curled up against the headboard of her bed, arms wrapped around her middle like she was about to fall apart.

That explained Dean’s discomfort. The only way he knew how to deal with a distressed woman was to kill the thing that was hurting her and since there was currently no smelling fugly corpse on the floor, Sam figured the problem wasn’t the kind you could shoot. And that meant Dean had no clue how to fix it. 

“Guys?” Sam asked, unsure what the hell was going on. Closing the door behind him, he sat next to Buffy and held out an arm in a silent offer of comfort. _That_ was how you dealt with distressed females. The slayer hesitated for a moment, her pride and independence getting in the way. 

But slow and steady won the race and Sam just stayed where he was, waiting for her to decide what she wanted. When she gave a tiny nod, he slid up the bed and sat inside her personal space. She leaned into him the slightest bit but didn’t relax. Comforting Buffy was every inch as hard and frustrating as comforting Dean. They were both more skittish than any monster Sam had ever come across in almost twenty years of hunting. 

He turned his eyes back on his brother, one eyebrow raised. It was both a question – what’s going on? – and a reprimand – this is how you do it, jerk. Rolling his shoulders, Dean shook off the hunted expression on his face and made his way over to them, sitting at the end of the bed, legs stretched long. 

For a moment, they were all completely silent. Then Dean nudged Buffy’s knee with his toes and she smacked at his ankle out of sheer reflex. He grinned. She rolled her eyes.

“Guys?” Sam repeated, glad that the silent agony moment seemed to be over, “What’s going on?”

“I lost my powers.”

“What?”

“I shoved Dean, and he didn’t even budge. Tried to break something, no result. I actually sprained my wrist, I think. It’s like I’m… normal. Human.”

She said the last with a desperate longing and at the same time, disgust. Sam knew the feeling. Wanting to be a regular, normal person for most of your life, only to get it and find it was horribly, horribly wrong and you suddenly didn’t fit your own skin anymore. Jess had made it easier for him, had helped him through it without ever knowing what ailed him, but he’d still fallen back into hunting with frightening efficiency and ease. Like he’d never been gone.

And in a way, he hadn’t. Once you touched the dark, you didn’t walk away again. Normal, Buffy had written in her journal, was never in the cards. And slayers didn’t just lose their superpowers. Unless… Sam cocked his head to one side, thinking hard, connecting dots and cross referencing everything he knew about their case.

What if…

“I think I know what’s going on.”

The others perked up. “Yeah? You gonna share?”

He kicked his brother in the hip and finally shared what he’d learned from the surveillance tapes. “Good news and bad, remember? Bad news is, the Impala really was stolen. The good news is, it’s our kind of gig. At exactly seventeen minutes past midnight last night, the car vanished into thin air.”

“We were still at the bar then,” Buffy remarked, the same instant that Dean complained, “Whaddya mean, vanished into thin air?! My car doesn’t just _vanish_.”

Sam ignored them both. “Between one frame and the next, it’s just gone. Like it was never there. Trick of the light. I don‘t know what kind of creepy crawly steals a car, but that’s what happened.”

“And how does that explain what’s going on?”

He glared at his big brother. Really, at twenty-nine you’d think the man had some patience. He could sit completely motionless for hours if it was for a hunt, but he couldn’t give Sam five minutes to explain himself.

“I’m getting there. First vic, writer. Without being able to read, he can’t do his job, right?”

“Well, duh.” Buffy’s vocabulary was apparently rubbing off on Dean. Lord help them all.

“Second vic. Painter. Painter without eyesight?”

“Can’t paint,” Buffy supplied, catching on, straightening now that the shapeless horror of losing part of herself seemed to be becoming solid. Something she could punch. Buffy liked punching things. Sam would have liked to claim that Dean was rubbing off on her, too, but she’d always been this way. It was like having two bloodthirsty, slightly deranged siblings instead of one, all of a sudden.

“Exactly. Just like a slayer without her powers can’t slay and a hunter without his car and weapons can’t hunt. I think whatever got the painter and the writer, got you, too. And I think it’s taking what’s most important to a person.”

Dean frowned intensely for a moment before decisively shaking his head. “No.”

“What? It makes sense, man. What else could it be? We have lost abilities, physical and mental, a car and mystical superpowers. You don’t just lose these things by accident. That’s the only plausible connection.”

“Well,” Dean shot back tensely, standing, “It’s the wrong one.”

“Why?”

Sam let go of Buffy to stand, too. What the hell was Dean’s problem now? Why was he bitching about this? Sam was right, he knew he was. It was the only logical conclusion.

“It just is, Sammy. Find a better explanation.”

“ _No_. What the hell is wrong with you?”

“For the-“

“Guys!” Buffy cut them off sharply, a long suffering expression on her face. “If you were any more emotionally stunted, you’d be brick walls. Dean, if you want to say something, just say it for once and don’t beat around the bush, it drives you both crazy. Sam, Dean thinks you’re wrong because the Impala isn’t what’s most important to him but he’s too much of a numbskull to say that out loud.”

They both just looked at the slip of a girl between them for a moment, floundering. No-one had cussed them out like this since they’d still been hunting with their dad and they suddenly both felt the overwhelming urge to say ‘yes ma’am’ and apologize for disturbing her.

Apparently, Buffy could be scary without superpowers. 

Then Sam turned to Dean and argued, “Of course the car’s the most important thing to you. Your entire life is in there, Dean.”

Crossing his arms over his chest, Dean studied the floor and sulked. “Doesn’t mean it’s the most important thing, Sammy.”

“Then what the hell is?”

Silence. 

“Oh for...,” Buffy snapped, flinging her arms in the air. Personally, Sam thought she was channeling her fear and helplessness into anger. At them. “It’s you, Sam, you dumb brick. The most important thing to Dean is you. And whatever took my powers didn’t take _you_ but the car. So either its intel sucked, or it’s something else. _Or_ , which you would both see if you’d pull your heads out of your butts for a sec, maybe this is a clue in itself? Maybe this thing _can’t_ take Sam so it took the car instead?” 

+

Buffy watched the boys watching her, steadily. They were both obviously rattling through all the info they had stored in those big, stupid brains of theirs, trying to put together the pieces she and Sam had thrown on the table.

She let them, concentrating on simply watching them. 

That was good. Watching Sam and Dean move was like watching a well-oiled machine, something with purpose and direction. Direction was good, too, because currently? Buffy didn’t have much of that. 

What’s a slayer without her powers? Sounded like the beginnings to a bad joke. And the punch line was _dead_.

She remembered the last time this had happened, Giles and the drugs and the crazy as bat shit vampire that had tried to kill her mom. She remembered going into that house with the certain knowledge that she was going to die, then and there, and without even a chance to fight back. Without even that much dignity.

And now, almost ten years down the road she was there again, just as helpless, just as useless. She was a tiny, skinny little girl who couldn’t even make a dent in someone like Dean. How the hell could she fight the supernatural? 

Answer: She couldn’t. And what did that leave? What was she without the slaying?

She had Faith and Robin and Josie, somewhere, several hundred miles away. She had Xander on another continent and she had an estranged sister who couldn’t understand her and didn’t try. She had a car and a credit card, a trunk full of weapons and a backseat full of books and clothes. She had pieces of other people’s worst nightmares stuck in her head. That was her life. She was twenty-seven years old, and that was her life.

Without slaying, without the hunt, she was a college drop-out on a road trip to nowhere. 

She was less than nothing. 

And that scared her. It scared her so badly. Not the being normal, no, she hadn’t even thought that far, but the missing. She missed her powers, imagined she could feel the hole inside where they used to be, missed them like a phantom limb, like an arm or a leg, or rather, both arms and legs. Defenseless, helpless, directionless, useless, purposeless, little dead girl.

So, panic. Sounded like a smashing idea.

Dean holding up the wall, squirming every time he had to look at her hadn’t helped. Oh, she knew it wasn’t her he was disgusted with, but her emotions, that he was being big and manly and helpless, but it didn’t matter much. All she saw was someone who relied on her to have his back and now she couldn’t do that anymore, all of a sudden. 

Sam had made it better when he hugged her, offered silent comfort. And then offered a distraction. A focus. Something to kill.

Except she couldn’t kill anything because her powers were gone and even the one gun she owned was as likely to break her hands now, as it was to kill some evil monster. 

It took what was most important, Sam said and Buffy wanted to laugh, laugh loud and long and hard because it hadn’t taken that from her. Not what was most important. It had simply taken everything. 

What was she when she wasn’t the slayer? No friends, no weapons, no hope. And now not even her anymore. 

She hadn’t thought she’d miss it. Hadn’t realized just how much she had become the very thing she’d run from all her teenage years. She made Faith look balanced these days and it _hurt_. It hurt so badly to not have this thing that defined her down to the very last molecule. She had dreamed of normal once but she’d left those dreams behind a long time ago, had jumped off the cliff and clung to the only thing that floated, the slaying. Can’t be normal? Then embrace the freakishness. But somewhere at the back of her mind was still a sixteen-year-old girl, screaming because she didn’t want to die and now… everything was very, very wrong.

So she concentrated on the boys, watched them move and think and be useful. Watched them like her life depended on it, because it did. She needed them now, more than she’d needed them inside the Nightmare. Needed them to figure this out because she couldn’t and she wasn’t and she didn’t and…

“Buff? You okay?” Dean stood in front of her, bent forward, studying her face.

She flinched back because he had slipped into her personal space and _she hadn’t noticed_ and he jerked back, too, to give her room. 

“Fine,” she told him, tried a smile and almost succeeded, “Peachy with a side of keen.”

For a moment she thought he’d let it drop, let her get away with the lie and pretend nothing was wrong. Specialty of all hunters, except Sam, who had somehow bypassed most of that conditioning. 

Then he smiled at her – the real smile, not the _come let me fuck you_ one – and looked her dead in the eye. “So, as long as you don’t have that wicked right hook, I can hit on you all I want, right?”

Sam groaned in the background and Buffy rolled her eyes, smacking him in the chest. He let himself be shoved, dramatically tumbling backwards onto his side of the other bed, chuckling. 

_We’re gonna fix this. You’re more than kicks and punches and cool moves. I’m with you. You’re not alone. It’ll be okay._

All that in a lame joke and an exaggerated act that would get him kicked out of junior high drama group.

Message received. Loud and clear. 

Her smile turned real as Sam sat down next to her again, journal in hand and pen poised. “Can you tell us what you remember from last night? Around the time the car went MIA?”

Dean whimpered softly at the reminder that his beloved baby was still gone before leaning on his elbows to watch them. For a moment Buffy met his gaze, then she flung herself backwards, wishing, for just a second, that she hadn‘t thrown out the vomit-y Timon. Something to hug close would have been kinda great just then. Plus, with her senses downgraded to normal, she probably wouldn’t be able to smell the vomit anymore. 

No such luck. She forced herself to leave her hands above her head and not curl into a tiny ball of misery, forced herself to remember the last night. Dancing. That asshole that had hit on her like it was his last night on Earth. And groped her in a funny way. And Dean, too. And boy, the look on his face as it happened.

Before that, Dean giving the guy a smack down to end all smack downs. She remembered, as an afterthought, that she had yet to yell at him for doing that. Later. And then? They’d left. Dean had driven home and thank God that he’d insisted on learning to drive the ‘stang because now the Impala was gone and without her super reflexes, she couldn’t even drive her damn car anymore.

Going home. Leaving the bar and silently wondering at how the world seemed… softer. Less bright than usual. Fewer edges and colors. The lights of the oncoming cars hadn’t blinded her like they tended to do since she’d crawled out of her grave. And she’d been tired. So very tired.

“I was sleepy,” she told Sam, waiting for him to tell her that she was always sleepy these days because she barely slept. He didn’t.

“And everything was sorta… soft. You know, like when you had a bit too much to drink and the world just bleeds away?” She pursed her lips, trying to find a way to explain how the world looked to her, usually. But how do you explain color to the blind?

“And today?” Dean sat up, elbows on his knees, keen interest in his green eyes.

She tangled the fingers of one hand in her loose hair and said, “It’s like an old video. Everything’s muted. Dull.”

For the first time in years, it didn’t hurt. Nothing was too bright, too loud, too harsh. She didn’t have to concentrate constantly to keep her senses from overloading, didn’t have to remind herself that this was Earth and she was alive. Not hell. Not torture. Life. Life as a souped-up superhuman with senses that would make any natural predator green with envy.

“You didn’t notice before you tried to punch me?”

Noticed? Not really. She’d taken a shower, dressed, walked out into the room to find panic. No time to register. No time to notice that the world had gone blissfully numb and silent. She’d noted the absence of the constant battering against her walls, but it hadn’t registered yet as wrong. She’d simply felt good. Relaxed. Slept a full six and a half hours.

“No.”

Sam scribbled for a moment, looked at her out of the corner of his eye, looked away again and asked, curiosity getting the better of him. “What do things look like to you normally? I mean, if you have human senses now and everything seems muted, then…”

He trailed off, not sure what then and Buffy shrugged awkwardly, because the gesture wasn’t meant for someone lying on their back, hands tangled in their own hair. 

“There’s a child’s drawing of a frog and a tree next to the door,” she finally said, almost smiling as both Winchesters turned to inspect the indicated spot of pale green wall – a piece of wall that was, rest their eyes, not plastered with the jungle and bug wallpaper that defaced two of the four sides of the room.

“There’s nothing there,” Sam protested, squinting.

“They painted over it,” she informed them calmly, watching disinterestedly as Dean stood and went to take a closer look at the wall. He shook his head and looked at her in awe.

“How can you see that?”

“I can’t,” she told him and then clarified, “I could yesterday, but not today. Can we get back on topic?”

For a moment, Dean scrutinized her as intensely as the wall. Then he shrugged and let it go. She didn’t want to talk about it? They wouldn’t. They had a monster to catch anyway.

Sam tapped his pen against the paper twice before snapping the journal shut and flinging it on the nearby table. For something they revered like a bible, the boys sure liked to throw that thing around. But then, Buffy was learning, that was the quintessence of what it meant to be a Winchester. No punches pulled and love beyond what most people could comprehend. Tough love, some might say, but that was too generic, too cliché. 

Anger and acceptance. It felt a bit like something she’d always been looking for but never found and wasn’t it strange, so strange, that she seemed to fit with those two men like a missing puzzle piece, seamlessly and effortlessly? People weren’t meant to click like that. Not outside the movies. 

“Buff?”

She jerked back into reality, realizing that both Sam and Dean were staring at her, worried. They’d probably called her name a few times while she’d been off in lalaland. Huh. She didn’t usually zone out like that. But then she didn’t usually have trouble focusing on everything in her vicinity at once. Came with the job description.

“Sorry. Guess I’m not used to being Jane Normal without the super senses.” She sat up, finger combing her still damp hair away from her face. Sam caught one of her hands as she dropped them in her lap, and squeezed it tightly. For the first time ever, the gesture hurt. Fragile, she was too damn fragile.

“You sure you’re okay?”

Hell, no.

“Yeah.”

She’d always been a fast learner.

+


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to offer an excuse for the lack of life signs, but I have none. Sorry.

+

 **Four**  
+

Dean was just about ready to rip someone to shreds and dance on the pieces when Sam abruptly stood, chair scraping over the uneven carpeting, announcing, “I’m getting dinner.”

Hallelujah! 

They’d been at it all day, turning page after page, going through books three, four times, in the hope of finding something new _this time_. Nothing. There was nothing that took what mattered most to people, excluding other people. 

It wasn’t a fairy, wasn’t a fae, not a ghost, or spirit, or curse, or spell, or witch, or goddamn freakin’ Bigfoot on a goddamn freakin’ stick. 

And all day long, through every minute he spent brooding over Buffy’s collection of books, he had that niggling feeling at the back of his mind, that tiny voice that whispered, _You’d find if you had_ your _books_.

He wouldn’t. Buffy’s library was more extensive, more diverse, than the one that had disappeared with the Impala. But the feeling was there, the need, the craving for his own possessions. The borrowed knife in his boot felt wrong, the gun on the table looked like it didn’t belong. He’d never quite realized just how attached he was to his few earthly possessions.

Nothing was right. He didn’t trust the weapons he had, didn’t trust the info, hell, he didn’t trust the _car_. All for the same illogical reason: Not his. 

It was probably a pretty big hint at how he needed to get his life in order, fix his messed up priorities and get over his trust issues but really, not the time. He had what? Ten months and change left to live. He wasn’t going to change now, wasn’t going to let go of all the scraps of his ratty, useless, pathetic life to make things better.

Because they could never be. Sam would have to go on without him soon and Dean would only make it harder if he got over all his issues and became the man his brother wanted him to be. 

So yeah, he was an insecure, trigger-happy bastard and fine with it, thanksalot. Not gonna change. He needed his car and his other shit to feel safe. Needed the comfort of knowing he had weapons to fight with, books to arm himself with knowledge and a car to run like hell when the other two options had failed. 

Currently he had neither of those things and for that he was going to kill some fugly’s ass dead. Very dead. 

He nodded jerkily at his brother’s announcement, knowing Sam was going stir crazy between his edgy, low simmering anger and Buffy’s new habit of bouncing between defeated, panicky and downright morose without a second’s warning.

Privately, Dean was pretty sure that even he had had a better grasp of how much the slayer depended on her super skills than she had. She relied on her senses to carry her through a conversation without really paying attention, trusted that she could retain any information on a case simply by having heard it once. She constantly used her reflexes to catch something thrown at her, to balance things as she carried them. Hell, even when walking she relied on her sense of balance to move quicker, more quietly and faster than a normal human. 

And those were just the little things Dean had noticed. Buffy on the other hand, seemed to have survived most of her life thinking that she only used her slaying powers in a fight. And now here she was, stumbling, stuttering, zoning out and dropping things. It was like she didn’t have the slightest clue how to operate her own body anymore. 

If that wasn’t bad enough, she regularly got that look in her eyes, that expression of utter devastation, as if someone had just ripped her heart from her body. 

In short, she was acting only remotely better than any clueless floozy they had ever picked up on a hunt. Not that he’d tell her, mind you, because he liked his balls intact and she was still _Buffy_ , but she wasn’t being particularly useful at the moment. 

Which he understood, really. She’d lost some integral part of herself and that was bound to freak people out, but he was freaked out, too, and there was work to be done. 

Sam grabbed some money off the nightstand and left, door slamming loudly in the silence that fell over the room. Buffy flinched and Dean rolled his shoulders, steeling himself. Sam gone, Buffy freaking the hell out, he about to kill someone out of sheer frustration; he’d have to bite the damn bullet and get all chick flick-y. And now he was speaking valley girl. Someone give him a gun. His own, preferably.

“Buffy,” he started, standing and making his way to her bed, where she sat, walled up behind several stacks of musty books, chewing on her thumbnail as she read.

She looked up at him, wide-eyed. Great, he’d startled her. Again. Apparently, her usually complete mastery of her surroundings was one hundred percent slayer induced. As a normal human, she was about as aware of her surroundings as a blind, deaf and dumb lemming. 

“I could use some air, come on.” 

Any other day she would have bitched at him to get his air alone, she could survive five minutes on her own. Not to mention killed him by death glare for offering her not one, but two hands up. Today she took them and let him extract her from her book fortress, obviously totally off her game. 

He snagged her jean jacket on the way out, handing it to her. Last thing they needed was a defenseless slayer with a case of the sniffles, giving them away by sneezing or something. She took that wordlessly, too. 

Wow. 

He was kinda starting to look forward to the endless blackmail material he’d have to dump on her when she was back to normal. 

They didn’t go far, just a few feet to the steps leading down into the parking lot. He sat down, patting the empty space next to him and remembered suddenly, how she and Sam had sat the very same way a few weeks ago, watching him check over the ‘stang. It’d been the first day after they’d ganked the Nightmare and Buffy had been amazing.

Tough as nails hunter, funny, smart, sarcastic, drove a great car, didn’t back down from anything. From that morning on, she’d fallen into step with them seamlessly, slipping into their routines, their hunts, their banter. She fulfilled Sam’s quota of chick flick moments so Dean didn’t have to. Even while sleep deprivation had been making her crazy, she’d still shrugged it off, moved on, _dealt with it_. No whining. No bitching. 

Was it any wonder he was crushing on the woman? She was perfect. 

Only now, looking at her huddling next to him, she wasn’t anymore. She was broken.

“How are you?” he asked, just to fill the silence. Buffy wasn’t supposed to be silent. She was supposed to babble and babble and babble and occasionally make a joke so dark that he froze for a moment before cracking up completely. 

“Peachy,” she chirped, but since that morning, the sentiment had lost all its credibility. She’d become smaller and smaller with every possible lead they crossed off their mental fugly list. Even the way she fingered her ever-present necklace seemed feeble.

“What…,” he started, not really sure what he was going to ask. He couldn’t exactly come out and share his observations of her. Could he? There was a reason he left this touchy feely stuff for Sam on a job and avoided it like hell when it came to his private life.

Luckily for him, the blonde next to him didn’t seem to need encouragement. She tugged at her sleeves, pulling them down over her hands and then spreading her fingers for inspection. Only the tips showed from under the faded blue denim and she wriggled them experimentally before dropping them into her lap, her gaze fixing on something a thousand miles beyond the dreary parking lot.

“I remember my last day as a normal human,” she said, very slowly, as if testing out the words, tasting them for rightness and content. Whether she was speaking to him or thin air was a mystery, so Dean leaned against the banister on his right and waited. Maybe this particular chick flick moment would run its course without him needing to do anything? A guy could hope.

“I was fifteen and it was June.” She grimaced and he figured it had more to do with her age than the month. Fifteen, huh? He’d already had his very own arsenal at the age of fifteen. A small one, true, but, be honest, an arsenal is an arsenal. But then he had also been raised into the life and from what little he knew of Buffy’s family, she hadn’t. He tried to imagine being fifteen and clueless and finding out that every shadow he’d ever jumped at really did have teeth and claws. 

He’d seen grown men crack under the realization, but Buffy.... He couldn’t help the quick look he shot in her direction. Had she cracked? For all he knew she’d been a completely different person once and she _was_ kind of unbalanced, what with the dark humor, the ability to shrug off blood and death and the strange hobbies she seemed to have. Normal people did not entertain themselves by figuring out new ways to hide blades on their person. 

On the other hand, he couldn’t remember ever having met a hunter that was entirely sane. Maybe you needed a few cracks if you wanted to live this life, so the pressure of all the crazy shit you saw and did could get out. If you were whole, an eventual explosion seemed inevitable. 

Whatever. She’d been fifteen. And then?

“I overslept because Mom and Dad spent most of the night screaming at each other in the next room and I barely got any sleep. Hurried out of the house, was late for Trig class. My teacher yelled at me and I popped my gum in his face. Childish, but at fifteen I thought it was hilarious. Especially since I knew he liked looking up my skirt when I slumped in my seat.”

She snorted, interrupting herself, “Not that I didn’t shamelessly abuse that knowledge and tease the man constantly. I was kind of shallow. And a bitch.”

“Still are,” he supplied, half out of sheer instinct, half because this was shaping up to become the Hallmark moment of the month and the Dean Winchester Book of Rules stated he had to try and avert it at all cost. Seriously, next she’d want a hug. 

“I skipped double English with Nat and Maggie and we went for ice-cream. Cheerleading practice in the afternoon and after that, Tom Wallace, quarterback and card carrying jock asked me to homecoming. At home, Dad and I had McDonald’s food because they fought again and Mom stormed out. I did my homework, talked to Nat on the phone for about an hour and went to bed.”

She met his gaze for the first time, solemn and forbidding. No pity for this girl. “I dreamed of a girl being torn apart by men with horribly disfigured faces and golden eyes. The next morning at breakfast, I broke my fork.”

And that was it. That was how Buffy the Cheerleader her become Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In her sleep, while another girl died and she watched and afterwards… Dean didn’t need to be told to know that nothing had been the same then. 

“It wasn’t even a very good day, that last day. Nothing remarkable. But I remember every second of it.” She grinned. “I hated being the slayer. I wanted nothing more than to be normal and if the world had to end, then so be it, just let me go to homecoming. When you asked other kids what they wanted to be, they said famous or rich. I said normal. It was all I wanted, Dean. For so long. I gave it up eventually, sure. Embraced the slaying life and all that. But now… I got what I wanted and look at me. I’m Daphne.”

“What?”

“Scooby Doo.”

Ah, Daphne. Sexy, useless and slowing the others down by constantly getting kidnapped, almost killed and generally being in the way. Dean hated having to admit it, but at the moment, she wasn’t too far off with that description. But there was a difference and that was that Buffy was actually good at this shit, unlike Daphne, who was simply dumb.

“Does that make me Fred?” he asked, smirking, “And is Sam Shaggy or Scooby?”

“Definitely Scooby and don’t try to distract me from my pity party,” Buffy ordered, her voice sharper than before. Remembering, maybe, that she wasn’t fifteen anymore.

“Well, it’s either that or hug you and I’m not sharing ice-cream with you, princess.”

She rolled her eyes at his macho posturing but otherwise ignored his comment. “Did you ever wanna be normal?”

That question really shouldn’t have blindsided him the way it did. Wasn’t like they’d been working up to it for the past ten minutes, or anything. He took a deep breath, considered brushing the question off like he usually would and then reconsidered. She’d given him something, right there, and now it was his turn, wasn’t it? That’s what the whole sharing and caring thing Sammy liked was all about, right?

So he opened his mouth and told her the same story he’d told Gordon Walker a million seedy bars ago. A hunt, fire, blood, the feeling of victory searing hot in his veins and the sinking certainty that he could never leave this behind. He’d been sixteen, watching a corpse burn, the smell seeping into his every pore and he’d known that he could never walk away. And wanting normal, wanting to be a firefighter, wanting kids and a house and a life had all fallen away. It wasn’t ever going to happen and he’d understood that, right there.

Since then, dreams were reserved for when he had his eyes closed and the thing that had scared him most, the hunting life, had become all he was and all he had.

Buffy looked at him silently for a long time after he finished his little story, long enough to make him squirm and want to fall back on his standard sleazy flirt routine. Then she suddenly laughed, surprised and loud. “You’re braver than me. Just letting it go. I held on for so long.” 

A headshake. 

“It’s not being brave. It’s just self-preservation. You focus on one thing too much, you lose track of everything around you.” A hunting metaphor. He had no clue how else to voice what he wanted to say.

“And then someone pulls the rug out from under you,” Buffy continued for him, “And you find yourself stranded in Dominion, South Dakota, free of the one thing you thought you hated most and realizing that it’s the only thing that actually keeps you glued together and in one piece.” She paused for a beat, thinking. “You know what? Life sucks. And then you die and come back and it still sucks. Since the Nightmare I sometimes wonder if I’m still asleep. If you’re both figments of my imagination and I never woke up. But I think even my twisted mind couldn’t come up with shit like this.”

She grimaced and curled her fingers into a fist, rapping her knuckles against the wooden steps they were sitting on. “So that’s my conclusion: This is real, because it’s too shitty not to be.”

She left her hand there, on the step and Dean leaned toward her and put his own next to it, their fingers barely brushing, just there, warm and solid. Real. As real as the monster in the closet, as real as the Nightmare had been, as real as waking up from it, as waking up this morning to find essential pieces of themselves missing and the world tilted at the wrong angle.

And Buffy came to another conclusion, one she hadn’t known still needed to be reached. She had, after all, walked away from all her friends and family once before, just because of this. She’d chosen the hunting life. And yet, there was that conclusion. That resolution that needed to be put into words. She needed to say it. It would solve nothing and get her nowhere except through the day and into tomorrow. 

There was always gonna be one more monster to kill.

“I don’t wanna be Daphne.”

+

Sam’s second return to their room that day led him to a scene that was decidedly different from the first. That morning, he had found Buffy and Dean on opposite ends of the room, uncomfortable and confused, straining against whatever was going on. Now, weighed down with Chinese takeout, he didn’t even make it into the room. 

His brother and friend were sitting on the topmost of the three steps leading up to the wraparound porch of the motel, silent and staring in different directions with their hands almost touching. Personally, Sam thought it was cute as hell, but he’d never say that out loud, thanksalot. All that was missing from the picture they made was linked pinky fingers. He took a moment to study the two of them and found, to his relief, that Buffy seemed to have finally relaxed and stepped back from the edge of panic she’d been riding all day.

But at the same time, her relaxation was not the boneless kind that came from sex and that made Sam even more relieved because while he knew that Dean liked Buffy, that his brother deserved all the happiness he could get, he didn’t want it to be like that. Didn’t want Dean and Buffy to become an item and lock him out of that easy dance they had invented between the three of them over the course of a few short weeks. He had his own crush and he knew it, but that wasn’t what this was about. 

Friendship, Sam knew, was a lot more solid than any quick affair that burned to the skies and then, inevitably, like any other fire, had to die. Jessica. Madison. Cassie. Lisa. Whatever the brothers gave was thrown back in their faces when the fire died and reality crept back in. But Buffy was different. Buffy was already real. 

Sam didn’t want her to burn.

So he dropped his booty in his brother’s lap and spun, sinking down to sit below her, his back resting against her legs. He stretched his own long, long legs out as he tilted back his head and asked, “Have fun without me?”

Buffy tugged on a strand of his hair and said with a smile in her voice, “Definitely, Scooby.”

“Huh?” 

Dean looked up from his hunt for chopsticks and grinned widely at his little brother. “Dude, you’re the one who never missed Saturday morning cartoons once when we were kids.”

Sam felt his own grin spread over his face as he understood. Then he remembered to be insulted and harrumphed. No-one bought it. 

“That mean you’re Shaggy?” he asked.

“No way, man, I’m Fred.”

“And Buffy? Velma?” He twisted so he could see the slayer properly, surprised when she put her hands on his shoulders and pulled him back against her, a move that made it both impossible to look her in the face and allowed her to hug him. 

“I’m working on that,” she abruptly spoke into his ear before letting go and accepting the container of food Dean held out to her, leaving Sam to wonder what the hell the two had done while he’d been gone. With anyone else he’d suspect some cheesy moment of tenderness and understanding, but this was Dean. And Buffy, who wasn’t really far behind his big brother in the repress-and-ignore department. She was all for talking about other people’s troubles, sure, but her own? Not so much.

Whatever.

He set aside the food his brother passed him in order to hunt through his jacket for the folded newspaper he’d snatched up while waiting at the restaurant. “Check this out,” he told Dean, handing his find over, right page already folded to the top.

“What am I lookin’ at?”

“Nicolas Gravin,” Sam supplied, picking his food back up and breaking his chopsticks apart. “We focused our research on local newspapers, but we forgot that the travel writer wasn’t actually from around here. He was from Des Moines. And he died last week.”

At that point, Dean found the article Sam had spotted only by accident while leafing through the newspaper and started reading out loud to a curious Buffy. “Blah blah, was found dead in his locked seventh floor apartment. The coroner’s report states that Mr. Gravin seems to have been mauled by wild dogs.” He looked up, skeptically. “Since when do dogs know how to use elevators?”

The youngest of the three nodded in agreement. “And what are the chances of running into two supernatural creatures within a few weeks of each other?” 

“Unless you’re us? Zilch. So this is definitely connected to him losing what’s most important.”

“I am so stupid!”

Both brothers spun to look at their companion who smacked her palm hard against her forehead before scrambling to her feet, almost toppling Sam and kicking over the cartons of food.

“The hell?” Dean snapped as he caught his rice before it spilled down the stairs, echoed by Sam’s “Buff?” 

But she was already jogging toward their room, waving one hand over her shoulder to indicate that they should wait for her to get back. With a shrug, Dean smacked Sam over the head with the newspaper, just because he could and then dropped it in favor of picking up his dinner and starting to munch happily on his Chop Suey. Sam deliberated for a moment before slipping into Buffy’s abandoned seat and starting to eat, too.

The slayer – ex-slayer? Temporarily-not-slayer? – came back two minutes later, a thick, yellowed tome clutched in her hands. She stepped over her own carton of Szechuan Chicken, careful not to topple anything this time, and glared at Sam for taking up her space. He just grinned and raised one eyebrow at her, daring her to complain. She rolled her eyes and sat down below him, effectively switching their earlier positions. Then she patted the book in her lap and informed her captive audience, “I’m completely stupid. Apparently, the slayer package includes mental capacity that I currently lack.”

Dean smirked, about to crack a joke, when Sam cut him off. “How so?”

“I said it myself. The fact that the thing didn’t take you might be a clue. And it is. It can’t take a soul without their permission. No demon can.”

“Woah,” Dean almost spat a piece of carrot back out, “You sayin’ this is a _demon’s_ work?”

She nodded, suddenly a far cry from the borderline helpless mess she’d been all day. The enemy had a face now and faces could be kicked the crap in. “It’s a dealmaker. A very specific one. Here.”

She opened the book somewhere close to the middle and held it up for the boys to see. 

“The Take Away Devil? Dude, that name sucks,” Dean gleefully complained, waving his food for emphasis.

“Oh, yeah! It’s got loads of different titles, though. Stealing Devil, Master Trade, Devil Trader. Always the same MO. It takes away what you treasure most, waits until you hit rock bottom and then offers you a deal. By the time it comes around, offering back what it took, you’re so desperate, you don’t ask many questions, much less demand the ten years that are typical for demon deals. You just say yes, get back what you lost and then, five minutes later, it’s hello hellhounds, goodbye soul.”

“What is that?” Sam asked. “Some backwards, whacked out form of Indian giving? It’s sure as hell not blackmail. Fraud maybe?”

He trailed off as he noticed his brother’s look. Dean shook his head and heaved a sigh. “Whatever, lawyer boy. How does Take Away Guy take people’s stuff away?”

Buffy shrugged as she snapped the book shut and put it down in favor of her cooling chicken. “Obviously, this has to be some kind of specific mojo, but the application would have to be old school, I think. How do demons usually do this kind of thing?”

Dean snorted. “You mean when they’re not throwing people into walls?”

“Kissing,” Sam supplied around a mouth full of vegetables. “Deals are sealed with a kiss.”

“I ain’t been kissing nobody last night, Sammy,” big brother growled, chopsticks brandished threateningly. “I think I’d remember that.”

Buffy licked some sauce from her bottom lip and interrupted the brewing bitching. “Guys. Don’t be so literal. It doesn’t have to be a kiss. Could be a handshake as well. Demon’s need physical contact for this kind of thing, that’s all.”

“So whoever touched both you and Dean around the time the Impala disappeared is our guy?” Sam wanted to know.

Both of them started to nod before they froze, gazes meeting. 

“Jake,” they both breathed. Suddenly his weird, out of place shoulder-pat-groping of both slayer and hunter made a lot more sense. Dean knew he should have beat the guy up.

+

+


	6. Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait. I'll try to upload the rest tonight, or by the end of the week at the latest.

+

**Five**

+

The silence in the car was getting oppressive. 

Dean had tried to force his mullet rock on Buffy and Sam, citing the ‘driver picks the music and shotgun shuts his cakehole’ rule. Buffy had smacked his hands away from the radio, citing her own rule, ‘my car, my damn music, macho man’. She’d found _Do Not Move_ by the David Crowder Band and started humming along, ignoring Dean’s grimace.

She had, however, had a hard time ignoring Sam’s rumbled protest from the backseat. “Can we not listen to that? Too Christian.”

“It’s still good music,” the slayer complained but after a moment, she sighed and turned it off anyway. They’d all had one too many run-ins with zealous fanatics of one religion or another to ever be comfortable with overt religiousness again.

Thus the silence. 

Well that, and they were all a tad frustrated when a basic search for Jake of the wandering hands and stolen things had turned up nothing, not even an address. It cemented their suspicion that Jake was their guy and pissed them all off just a bit because they should have noticed the night before. Should have noticed that he’d tried too hard to touch them. He was too loud, too stupid, too drunk. He’d played them like a pro and they’d fallen for it like a bunch of tourists.

Buffy slumped in the passenger seat, wishing she could drive her car. Dean concentrated on driving and Sam was bouncing around the backseat, dissatisfied with their plan. 

Which was to pay the blind painter, Marc Eddison, a visit. They had been planning to interview him before the whole missing-important-things bit had thrown them for a loop, but it was just as well since this new plan did not include making contact with the newly handicapped man. Stake out, Dean called it. Boring, Buffy called it. They were going to wait and see if Mr. Stealing Devil was going to come around and make his offer.

The only alternative, Buffy’s idea to serve herself up as bait had been shot down faster than you can say _sexist_.

“You aren’t exactly top of your game right now, princess,” Dean had intoned solemnly, with Sam nodding the chorus in the background. 

She’d wanted to fight them on it but there really was no point. She wasn’t useless. She’d proven that when she connected the dots and found out what they were hunting. She still had the knowledge, the gut feelings that were more instinct than conscious thought. She still had the formal martial arts training she’d always had. But she lacked the senses, the speed, the strength, the balance. Her mind worked just fine, but her body was still getting used to not being supercharged for the first time in more than a decade.

Even on her eighteenth birthday, her slayerdom hadn’t been _gone_ , just suppressed. Staring out the window and with twelve hours of distance between now and this morning, she could admit that suddenly being normal had broken something inside of her. Something she’d long thought broken. That thing, that damn demon, had taken what no-one had dared take before. 

Her identity. It had stolen what made her the person she was and she’d reeled, reeled badly, groping around in the dark, trying to figure out who she was. Because with everything else gone, she was suddenly fifteen and a cheerleader again. A cheerleader thrown into the middle of a bloody, gory, Technicolor war. Only she wasn’t that girl anymore, had the memory of all the years in between and still…

She had spent an hour staring at the wall, trying to come up with an analogy and failing. Yes, there was another part, something left beside the teenager, but the less she thought about that bit, the better. She needed the desert now, not the sky.

All day, she’d been running around like a chicken with her head cut off. Like Buffy, the teenaged version, who didn’t know her butt from responsibility, didn’t do research, or duty, or anything she did now. A girl. She’d felt so grown up then, running from her destiny, fighting for shopping trips and dates, but she’d been a child. 

It had taken Dean and his strange comfortless brand of comfort to help her shut her brain up and start being useful. She’d been Buffy before she’d been the slayer and while she was a different Buffy now than she had been before, she was still Buffy. Identity was a fluid thing, always in flux, changing, moving. It wasn’t just one word, one layer. There was a girl in her, a hunter, a slayer, a lover, a friend. Just like the demon had taken Dean’s car and all his possessions but not his memories, it had taken a part of her, but only that. 

She’d tried to explain her epiphany to Sam earlier and failed because she really didn’t have the words to say, ‘I am more than this’, without sounding like a walking cliché. That, and if he took her literally, she’d be hard pressed to avoid giving him some answers she didn’t want to give.

What it all boiled down to, the best way she could phrase it was this: If the past twelve years of her life had taught her anything, it was to never give up. So she wouldn’t. That was how she rolled and this time, she had two damn good hunters to watch her back.

Or backside, as the case may be.

+

It started raining the moment they arrived at the address Sam had found. Dark, cold and now wet, too. Dean was sure that someone had it in for them. Not that that thought was new, mind you; he’d pretty much been convinced of that since first grade but damn, rain? He hated rain.

At least, he told himself, there was no mud. He hated mud more than rain. He killed the engine as Sam pointed out a pale blue house across the street, which was where the blind painter lived. There were no lights on anywhere in the house, but then the guy couldn’t see, so Dean figured it didn’t mean much.

He slumped in the driver’s seat, content to let the others do the watching for now, listening to Sam rattle off all their intel and their more-than-sketchy plan again. Not because they didn’t know it yet, but because Sam liked order and he liked repeating things. It calmed him, or something. Dean thought it was bogus since ninety percent of their plans went to hell within the first two minutes anyway, but if it put his baby brother at ease, who was he to protest?

“So we wait, see if the demon shows up, try to trap it and find what was lost and then – “

“Er, guys?” Buffy interrupted and knocked on the passenger side window with one knuckle. “Does the window next to the front door look broken to you?”

Dean straightened, following the line of her extended finger and after some squinting made out something dark fluttering in the night. A curtain billowing out of a broken window. 

Shit.

All three of them jumped out of the car, slamming the doors shut almost simultaneously, drawing weapons. Buffy was the first to break into a run but was soon overtaken by both Winchesters. Under normal circumstances, Dean might have secretly felt bad for rubbing her newfound weakness in like that, but in this case, he was glad because she wouldn’t reach the house and whatever had broken the window first. 

He was Fred and it was his job to save Daphne. Even if Daphne would probably claw his eyes out for it afterwards. 

He pressed his back flat against the wall next to the front door, exchanging a look and a nod with Sam, who didn’t bother trying the lock before kicking the door in with gusto. They shoved into the house fluidly, Sam covering the right, Dean the left, scanning for any threats, guns cocked and ready.

Once they were sure there were none, Sam started climbing the stairs while his brother moved down the small hall and into the kitchen. Buffy, having swallowed her resentment at being left behind for the time being, trailed behind him, making sure nothing snuck up on them. 

The back of the house was clean so they moved to the left again and back toward the front and the room with the broken window. 

“Eugh,” Buffy gagged demonstratively, waving a hand in front of her face to try and disperse the rancid, knife-edged stench of the body behind the sofa.

Dean grimaced as he covered his own mouth and nose, clicking the safety back on his gun to take a closer look at Marc Eddison. 

What was left of him.

Sam came clattering down the stairs and into the room through another door, stopping dead as he hit the solid wall of smell. “Guess we were a bit too late, huh?”

Dean nodded. Marc lay on his back, his face a mask of blind panic even in death. His entire torso, from collarbone to hip was a bloody, open mess, ripped to shreds by wickedly sharp claws and teeth. What was left of his guts lay around him in puddles and bits, the source of the rancid smell. Swallowing bile, Dean slowly extended one hand to hover over the ruin of the dead man’s chest.

“Still warm,” he announced. They had barely missed the action.

“So the demon was here,” Buffy summarized, “Made the deal and then sent in the dogs?”

“Probably. They came through the window, ripped Marc’s soul to hell. We can’t have missed them by more than a few minutes,” Sam agreed.

Faintly, the sound of sirens reached their ears. They all flinched, exchanging glances. Breaking windows. Dogs. Screams. This was a residential area. Shit. Someone had called the cops. Double shit.

+

They made it out of there by the skin of their teeth, slipping into a side street just as the first police car turned into the street, hoping madly that none of the neighbors had seen them running around, waving their guns.

Or had enough presence of mind to write down the number plate of Buffy’s car.

But in the end it boiled down to them having had closer calls in the past and so they got back down to business rather quickly.

“Our only lead is dead,” Sam stated rather pessimistically, obviously resigned to starting back at the beginning.

“Is not,” the slayer shot him down immediately, “We still have two leads left and one of them is even viable.”

It took the brothers a moment to connect the dots. Then Dean stood, pointed one angry finger at her and snapped, “The hell you are!”

There was still her and him, the two leads they had left. Demons were cautious by nature, so it was unlikely it would fall for Dean playing bait, but Buffy was weak enough, small enough like this that a demon with a big ego would fall for it. Besides, it had shown interest in her the night before. Groping and dancing were definitely not the usual MO for stealing people’s most important bits. Besides, it had gone for her before it had gone for Dean, indicating that she was the real target. Dean wasn’t even eligible for a deal, really. The demon had only stolen from him after he’d gotten socked in the jaw. Dean was petty revenge, nothing more. Buffy was the one it had really gone after.

Sam, coming to the same conclusion as the other man a split second later, nodded decisively and added his own, “We’re not doing it that way.”

Buffy rolled her eyes but remained calm. “Then how are we going to do this? Because last we checked, Marc Eddison was dead.”

Before, when she’d even dared suggesting using herself as bait, the idea had been shot down, stomped on and buried in a shallow grave. But now their only other lead was, as Sam had pointed out so helpfully, dead. 

“We can just find this Jake guy’s place.”

“Like a demon would be stupid enough to stay in its hosts apartment. Your search earlier turned up nothing and you heard the horny waitress. He just moved here. No friends, no family, probably not even a permanent address yet. How are we gonna find him? Drive through town until we stumble and land on top of him? And then hope that the demon inside of him is dumb enough to sit and wait while we get rid of it?”

Jake was their man and the demon had already gotten one over on them when it’d killed the painter right under their noses. Or almost, at least. 

She shook her head, sending her hair flying every which way. “I go back to the bar. I pretend we had a falling out, convince the demon it has the high ground. I’m just a weak, depressed, normal human now. Can’t harm it worth shit. Make it feel safe and cocky. I’ll get it away from the bar and we do our thing.”

“Great,” Dean clapped once, sarcasm dripping off him. “Except for the part where you get killed by the son of a bitch and we can’t do shit to help because we’re not there.”

“It wants to deal with me, not kill me.”

“It will as soon as it figures out we’re on to it. Besides, I don’t think it took something from two hunters without knowing what we are.” Sam. Voice of reason. Kind of annoying.

Buffy huffed in frustration. “So it knows. I’m still the Guardian even without my powers. You know what that means? It means any demon between here and Nepal would give its left leg to get its claws into my soul. A Guardian’s soul in hell? That’s like having a Ferrari in high school. Instant fame.”

Dean grimaced at the Italian car analogy, Sam scowled and Buffy looked triumphant, sure that the demon would take the bait she presented because it _wanted_ to. She was the longest living, the queen slayer, the Guardian of Hell. And it already had half of her. Demons were about greed and power and the prospect of getting all of her would fry the circuits of even the smartest of the lot.

Besides… “The demon can’t make a deal with you anyway. You’re off the market, Dean.”

It was a low blow, but it took the fight right out of both Winchesters.

+

To their credit, the boys managed to put up a full thirty minutes of useless protest before finally giving in gracelessly because in the end, Buffy’s option was the only viable one. Dean already had a deal on his soul. The stolen Impala was simply the demon’s way of getting revenge for the fist the hunter had planted in its stolen face the night before.

Buffy was the one it was after, the ace in a stack of twos. Jackpot. 

So Buffy was what they would give it. That and a one way trip to the land of sulfur and brimstone. But not tonight. Buffy wanted to go and finish this thing right now but with their little B&E escapade, it was almost midnight already. Even demons had a bedtime.

So instead of going monster hunting, they settled in for some crappy motel TV with a few bottles of beer – coke for the girl – some chips, and guns for Dean to clean. It wasn’t some sort of weird fetish. He just liked to be prepared. Really. And there weren’t all that many anyway, since most of their arsenal was gone with the car. They only had what they’d had on them and in the room. Three guns, in fact. What did it say about their lives that three guns didn’t seem enough? 

He stood with a frown and gathered their knives. They had a lot of knives. Or rather, Buffy had. He’d just clean those, too. Just to be sure. 

They settled on some crappy seventies flick that involved a lot of screaming women and badly costumed monsters whose strings were visible and Sam and Buffy curled up on the big bed, while Dean spread a small arsenal across the floor at their feet and started a running commentary on the total fail of the movie’s hero.

Sam listened with half an ear, more than used to watching any movie with his brother’s sometimes funny and sometimes annoying observations buzzing in one ear. Buffy seemed unconcerned with the entire thing, laying her head on his shoulder almost immediately. The next time he looked down at the crown of her blonde head, her breathing was deep and regular. She was asleep.

With a snap of his fingers, the younger caught the older Winchester’s attention and then pointed at their friend. Dean quirked a smile as he noticed her closed eyes. 

“Apparently, being normal is harder than being a superhero,” he observed, taking care _not_ to whisper. Whispering indicated secrecy and all three of them would wake if their subconscious registered something untoward going on. Talking normally was the best way to make sure the slayer remained asleep.

“Hey,” Sam defended her, “She’s had a hard day and she’s not used to being normal.”

He grimaced at his own word choice. Being normal. Even without her powers, she was still a girl on an endless road trip with two guys who made a really bad living hunting all kinds of things that went bump in the night. ‘Normal’ was not really the word any sane person would use to describe her situation. And that was before you added in the psychic powers, demon deal and Take Away Devil.

Dean shrugged, neither denying nor confirming Sam’s words. “We gonna put her to bed?”

“Nah. Just let her sleep, man.”

Another shrug. “Dude, it’s your arm that’s gonna go numb.”

It was. Sam didn’t mind very much though. Buffy needed the sleep and he needed the contact with another living, breathing thing. The Winchester manliness was a good way to deal with awkward situations, but it didn’t really satisfy a craving for physical reassurance. No more than three hugs a month; that was the rule of thumb. More only if there was mortal peril of unusual proportions involved. 

“You think her plan’s going to work?” Sam asked out of the blue after a few minutes of silence.

Dean put down the barrel he was carefully cleaning and looked up at his brother. “I think it’s damn stupid. But is it going to work?” he ran a hand over his face, leaving a grease stain along his left cheekbone. “It better.”

And that pretty much summed it all up.

+


	7. Six

+

**Six**

\+ 

The next day was what was commonly known as boring as shit. All they did was wait for nightfall so Buffy could doll up and hustle herself a demon. In a bar full of lonely rednecks who hadn’t seen a woman under fifty - other than Andy of the tight jeans and fake boobs - in a long time. 

Why were they doing this again?

Right. They had no choice. Not if they wanted to get their friend back to normal and find Dean’s car. Speaking of, about halfway through the day and after twenty seven games of Go Fish, he seemed to spontaneously remember that his beloved baby was missing and picked right back up where he’d left off the day before when they had noticed Buffy’s little condition.

He whined. He bitched. He whined some more. Sam threatened dismemberment. Buffy waited until the clock struck five and then disappeared into the bathroom at lightning speed, not coming back out for hours, leaving Sam to weather his brother’s abject misery alone.

“My car. Sammy, my _car_. I lost my virginity in there. My phone number collection is in there. My sawed-off. My favorite machete. My throwing stars!”

As far as Sam knew, his brother had yet to use those throwing stars on anything other than defenseless barn walls and makeshift targets nailed to tree trunks. But at this point he didn’t even bother answering anymore. Dean was dissolving into a puddle of loss and somehow, Sam couldn’t be mad at the dramatic performance happening less than six feet away from him because that car was also the place where he’d said his first word – ‘Dean’, according to Dean – where he’d spent half his childhood playing with his brother in the backseat. He’d been taught how to clean a gun in that car, how to play poker, how to flirt and how to kiss, to the eternal embarrassment of all Winchester men. 

Dean’s way of missing his car was loud and annoying and over the top but that was just Dean. Underneath the bluster he was missing that car like a limb because it was as close as he’d gotten to have a home since the age of four. 

So instead of yelling until he shut up, Sam settled on Buffy’s bed and flipped on the TV, letting the constant stream of bitching wash over him.

Which was how half past eight found them, waiting for Buffy to come back out in full battle/bait-regalia. Sam waited patiently, while Dean, whose experience with a woman’s get-pretty rituals was mostly restricted to ‘where’s my bra’ and ‘don’t smear my lipstick’, was getting close to bouncing off the bug wallpaper. Of course they had done nothing but wait all day, so that was kind of understandable but couldn’t the man just. Hold. Still. For five minutes?

The bitching Sam could forgive but the bouncing was another can of beer entirely.

Until the bathroom door opened and all of Dean’s higher brain functions sort of… ceased. Buffy’s hair was loose, shiny and falling in large curls around her face. Her make-up was just there, enough to accentuate big eyes and cherry lips. A bit cheaper probably than she liked, but just good enough for picking up random sleaze bags in a small town bar. 

Her black leather pants were poured on and Dean swore he heard Sam swallow hard next to him. Skin tight pants, great hair, those things Dean could deal with. No problem. But why the hell would a hunter on the road have four inch spike heels and a barely-there shirt in deep purple stashed away in their trunk? It was a tiny, strapless affair that tied behind her back and little more than wisps of semi-transparent fabric that hid just enough to drive anything with a pulse stir crazy. Her necklace was gone, undoubtedly tucked away somewhere on her person, but out of sight.

“Damn,” Dean finally breathed, letting out a low whistle. Sam nodded dumbly, fixated on the heels. How did she walk in those things? Better yet, how did she look wearing nothing but those things?

Buffy leaned against the doorjamb in all her come-fuck-me glory and blinked impossibly long, dark lashes at them. 

“Is it too much?” she asked innocently.

Erm…

“Let’s put it this way,” Sam offered, finding his voice, “We might not need that exorcism. The demon might simply combust.”

At that Dean felt something like a growl rise in his chest. He so didn’t want anyone but Sam and himself to see Buffy like this. The thought of letting her loose in a bar filled to capacity with lonely, horny men without them there to protect her turned his stomach. What if someone else hit on her first? What if they didn’t take no for an answer? It wasn’t like she could simply break the guy’s wrist and smack him down at the moment.

Not good. Not good at all.

He took a breath and opened his mouth to say so, when he noticed Buffy’s green gaze on him, hard and stubborn and hurt. She wanted this, had planned this outfit. Because it gave her power. Made her useful. She didn’t give a damn about drunk idiots groping her. She just wanted to feel less weak. Not Daphne. Damn. Damn, damn, damn.

That outfit and those heels were her knife under the pillow, her extra ammo clip in the glove compartment. Security. A way to feel safe and strong even when you knew you really weren’t. He slanted his eyes toward Sam and bit his lip. Little brother would have a field day analyzing that. Paranoia and safety blankets. He’d never ever get him to shut up if he ever found out. 

So he said nothing against Buffy’s weapons of choice, opting instead to simply throw her jacket at her and motion for is brother to get his ass into gear. If they had to spend the evening in the car on stake out duty, they were definitely getting something to eat first. And coffee. They would need lots and lots of coffee to hold on to so they wouldn’t storm into that bar and start bashing in the heads of everyone who looked at their little slayer the wrong way.

+

Buffy picked the label off the beer bottle she’d been playing with for the past thirty minutes. If she’d had any intention of actually drinking it, it’d be unbearably warm and flat by now. Lucky for her, she wasn’t touching the stuff. Not only was it beer, which she didn’t like in the first place and had stayed well away from since a certain cave-girl incident, but it was also alcohol and that didn’t mix with her at all, even when she had the metabolism of a racehorse on speed.

Which, currently, not so much. Then there was the part where she was playing bait for a demon that predated the bible and seemed to have the hots for her. There was so much no in that, it made her stomach turn. 

She looked around the bar again, somehow managing not to meet anyone’s eyes in a way that might be interpreted as an invitation and smiled as Andy, the horny waitress, flounced over and asked if she wanted something else to drink. No, she didn’t.

She shifted on the bar stool, tugged at the strapless shirt that was slipping just a little and bit her lip. Where the hell was that demon?

+

Dean was happily munching M&Ms, his gaze fixed steadily on the entrance of the bar, as if he could see Buffy through the solid wooden door and make sure she was alright. Usually, the thought of Dean with x-ray vision would have given Sam nightmares but today, he wouldn’t have minded the ability.

He really didn’t like this plan. 

He held his palm flat in front of his face, a single, red M&M lying in the center, twitching occasionally. He was trying to make it go in circles around his palm, but so far, he didn’t have much success. He was getting better at abrupt movements toward or away from himself, but when it came to actually _aiming_ he seemed kind of hopeless. With narrowed eyes he gave it another try, causing the lonely candy to sort of lurch half an inch forward and then to the right. 

Whatever switches Ava had found that could be flipped in their heads, Sam had yet to stumble across one. For him, this was hard work. Or maybe it was his fear of becoming a monster that hid the switches from him. Who knew?

His head chose that moment to inform him that it had enough with a stab of pain in the vague vicinity of his left temple and he gave up with a sigh, popping his test subject into his mouth. Dean, who had been watching the experiment in his peripheral vision snorted and stuffed another handful of candy in his mouth.

Then he swallowed, slurped some of his lukewarm coffee and asked, “D’you think this is what havin’ a sister’s like?”

Sam cocked his head to one side, thinking about it. He didn’t like the idea of other men staring at Buffy’s equipment. He didn’t like that they might touch her, or talk to her. And the idea that one of them might hurt her made him want to kill someone before dragging her out of that place and back to the motel room where he could tie her up so she’d never ever have such a stupid idea again and then…

“Nope,” he answered, popping his ‘p’, Buffy style. “Not feelin’ all that brotherly toward her, man.”

Dean stared out the windshield for a moment, apparently running that through and then blinked. “Oh. Yeah. Me neither.”

They looked at each other, recognition on their faces as they came to the same conclusion as the last time they’d been here. 

“We’re both screwed.”

“Awesome.”

Dean looked like he might have said something else but right then a tiny red _thing_ \- he refused to call that travesty a car because it looked like it belonged in a cereal box – pulled into the parking lot with screeching tires and out stepped no other than their new demon pal, Jake.

+

He zeroed in on her like she had a homing beacon hidden in her shirt and Buffy was glad, really glad, that she didn’t have to fall into total ho-mode to chat the guy up after he’d taken Dean’s fist to his face two nights earlier. Apparently, he had really short memory because as he sauntered over to her, swinging his car keys on his extended forefinger, he didn’t look like he’d learned any sort of lesson from their last encounter.

Good for her, bad for any other woman he might ever pick up. Except he wouldn’t because they would kill him tonight, as soon as she had her _oomph_ back and Dean the Impala and then everything would be all sunshine and daisies again. Ha!

“Well, hello beautiful,” he drawled as he leaned on the bar next to her and waved at the barkeep for a beer. His hand unerringly found her shoulder again, patting twice before settling in for the long haul. “Didn’t think I’d see you here again.”

She nodded solemnly, bent forward - and yes, there went the eye-contact – and confessed, “You remember those guys I was with?”

He nodded, gaze still too far south. The demon was either the world’s greatest actor or a total, epic loser. 

“I kinda had a fight with them and now… now I feel _really_ bad. So I came here for some cheering up.” 

She almost bit her lip, thinking she’d totally blown it. No way any halfway sentient being would fall for that. But, to her utter amazement, Jake did. He blinked goodbye to her cleavage and met her gaze, mock sincerity pouring off him. “You poor, little thing. Let me help you.”

His beer arrived and he immediately ordered another, pushing his at her, looking on expectantly. She took a small sip, tired not to cringe and gave him her best bubblegum smile. She was used to conning her way in and out of trouble with her looks and silly blonde act, but this was… the term ‘too good to be true’ came to mind. 

Buffy felt her smile falter and quickly pasted it back on. Why had she insisted on being bait? Oh, right, because it was their only chance and she wanted to be useful. Only this was far too easy and she couldn’t fight properly, stood no chance of outrunning the guy and played without knowing any of the cards. 

All the animal instincts that had long since become too ingrained in her to ever be taken away again screamed one thing at her: Trap.

Trouble was, if she backed out, the demon would know they were on to it and she could kiss her life goodbye. Slayer without the strength to fight back? She gave herself twenty-four hours to live after that got out. If she survived the initial showdown with the brassed off demon inhabiting Jake, the village idiot, that is.

She took a deep breath, clutched her beer close, like a weapon instead of a drink and put her free hand on his arm, slowly stroking up and down. “And how do you plan to do that, Jake?”

+

They slipped out of the car as soon as the thing wearing Jake’s body disappeared into the bar so there wouldn’t be any slamming car doors to alert the demon later. Then, crouching, leaning against the Impala’s left side, duffel bag sitting between them, they both counted up the minutes from one to twelve.

Sam shifted to put more weight on his left leg because his right still stung from getting thrown around on the last hunt and Dean cursed under his breath and they went back to counting, trying not to get twitchy. Even looking like she did, even with _bait_ written all over her, Buffy needed time to haul in the demon. 

But she would. The demon wanted her, wanted her soul, she was sure of that. It would believe her, would go along because she would make an offer too good to refuse and they would come out here and Sam and Dean would jump the demon, exorcise it, cursing all the while that they had run out of the special bullets for the Colt and not yet gotten more from Bobby. 

Seventeen minutes. Still nothing.

At twenty-one the door opened and both men exhaled sharply as they made out their friend’s backlit form in the doorway, laughing coyly, too high and cheap, pulling someone along behind her. 

Jake followed her into the parking lot with a besotted look that should have made the boys stop and think but didn’t, trailing after her like a puppy, start struck.

She led him toward the back of the building, whispering things in his ear that Sam never wanted to hear as long as he lived and then they moved, low and quick, into the shadows behind the bar where they found Buffy walking backwards, putting her back against a wall, fluttering her lashes.

They separated, one low against either wall, closing in slowly, so as not to alert the demon to their presence. As long as it was distracted, it shouldn’t notice them. And Buffy was doing a hell of a job on the distracting front. Before Sam ducked behind a dumpster he just barely caught a glimpse of her trailing a single fingernail down the demon’s chest. He shuddered and slid one foot forward to take the next step and – 

\- accidentally dislodged an old bean can that clattered noisily to the ground and startled everyone in the alley.

Sam flinched, Dean glared, Buffy jumped and Jake whirled around, wide-eyed. The second he laid eyes on the brothers, recognition sparked across his face, followed immediately by fury.

“You bitch!” he screamed, shooting around, hands extended to hit Buffy, who tried to duck but was way too slow. She brought her hands up to block and Sam already saw horror visions of those bird-like wrists broken in a dozen places. Jake batted them away with one hand, burying the fingers of the other one in her hair to the hilt. He smacked her into the wall, then snarled in her face, “You fuckin’ bitch! You set me up!”

He jerked his hand in her hair sideways, sending her to the ground painfully where she stayed, gasping for breath. The brothers finally reached Jake and Dean jumped on him while Sam inserted himself between Buffy and the fight.

Jake, running on sheer fury, elbowed the older Winchester in the face and twisted out of his grasp, making a run for it. Dean followed as soon as he’d found his balance and shot after him. Sam hesitated for a second, looking down at Buffy, who’s left arm was bleeding from where it had broken her fall. She was painfully probing at the back of her head, weaker and smaller than Sam had ever wanted to see her. He had a sudden flashback to Dean after he’d electrocuted himself, someone so strong suddenly so small and pale. Just looking at his brother then had turned his stomach with how _wrong_ it was.

Buffy looked the same now. Defeated. Until she huffed and all but snarled, “Go!”

He nodded and took off after his brother, finding him about a hundred feet to the left where he was just bringing down Jake with a tackle from behind. By the time Sam reached the madly scrambling duo, Dean had an elbow wedged under Jake’s chin and was cutting off his air supply.

Still the other man kept trying to grab onto Dean somehow, to get a hold of him. Probably to take something else from him. He managed to punch the hunter in the stomach with his left hand and lunged upwards with his right, getting a grip of his opponent’s upper arm and holding on for dear life. 

Dean snarled, fed up with being groped and stolen from and rammed his free arm into the guy’s elbow, forcing him to let go or suffer broken bones. Then he ground down hard on the other’s windpipe.

“Hold still, you shit, and stop trying to fucking touch me!”

Jake obeyed, stopping his struggles, hands dropping to his sides, eyes wide and panicked suddenly. He tried to say something but Dean just pushed into his throat harder to shut him up and extended one hand toward Sam, who passed him the holy water.

Then, with an expression of pleasure that Sam never liked seeing on his brother, he upended the whole bottle in the demon’s face. Jake writhed and spluttered, choking on the water, spitting mouthfuls back out.

“What…,” he gasped, sounding like he was drowning, “The hell?”

Dean and Sam froze, staring at Jake numbly.

Shit.

Jesus fucking Christ, _shit_.

Jake wasn’t smoking.

+


	8. Seven

+

**Seven**

+

Buffy watched Sam go. All three of him. 

If she’d needed any more proof that she was concussed, this was it. Ouch. Jake hadn’t even pushed that hard. Barely a love tap. And here she was, woozy as hell, seeing three of everything, her left arm one big, bloody scrape and her knees feeling like jelly. 

Normal sucked. Suddenly, she laughed. God, this was what she’d wanted for so long? Being this pathetic? If only Willow and Dawn and the others could see her now. They’d wanted her to be normal after Sunnydale, to slow down. Play the game from the safety of a Scottish castle. No more front lines for the Scoobies. Safe lives in all the comfort the Council could provide. They’d wanted to stop and just _live_.

She’d told them no, that she couldn’t do it. Couldn’t sit back and let others fight the war.

Be normal. God, if they could see her now, being a normal, beat up girl in a dirty alley, hurt and helpless. She wondered if this was what they’d wanted for her. And she laughed because, yeah, she was pretty sure they would still say that this was better than dying namelessly in some hidden war, surrounded by fairy tale monsters that shouldn’t even exist. 

Fairy tales. Whoooo. She’d loved fairy tales once. Back when she’d been _normal_. Now? Not so much.

“Are you okay, sugar?”

Erm… was she? “Good question.”

She squinted through her hair and dizziness, up and up and up until she found the face of the person who’d spoken. It was Andy. All those nasty Andies who had groped Dean and tried to get him to have sex with them! 

“Come on, sugar,” the left Andy said, “Let’s get you off the ground.”

The middle Andy reached for her and the right one hooked her arms under Buffy’s and pulled her to her feet with surprising strength, steadying her as the world went _whoooooa_.

“What happened?” Andy asked, steering her toward the back. 

“Asshole,” Buffy supplied, distracted by the pain and the way the world wouldn’t stop under her feet and the fact that being normal sucked. Lemons. How had her friends ever dared demand this of her? A normal life? Normal was evil. It hurt and made you weak and then it made you dead. 

“Jake?”

She nodded and regretted it, bringing one hand up quickly to stop her brain from leaking out of her eyes.

“You should probably lie down, sugar. There ya go.” A door opened and Buffy let Andy turn her around and push her into a soft seat. Oh, soft was good. But something wasn’t right. They weren’t in the bar and Sam and Dean weren’t here.

“Boys?” she asked, trying to convey that she wanted them, now please.

“Don’t you worry,” Andy smiled widely, lifting Buffy’s legs and shoving roughly, “They’re a bit busy at the moment.”

Then she punched Buffy in the face and slammed the car door shut. Three seconds later she was peeling out of the parking lot, slayer safely tucked away in her backseat. 

+

The brothers jumped away from Jake as if burned, cursing up a storm. He wasn’t the demon. He was a women beating, sleazy, disgusting specimen of mankind but he was not possessed by a demon. And the groping was apparently just that, nothing more than a weird habit of a weird guy.

“Who is it?” Sam demanded, almost frantically.

Dean shook his head, looking between his brother and their supposed prey, as if the answer lay somewhere in between. Hold on. Him here, Sam here, asshole here and demon not here? That meant – 

“Buffy!”

As one he and Sam took off toward the alley where they’d left their friend, balls of lead settling in their stomachs. It was empty. No Buffy.

“Maybe she went inside.”

Instead of following them to get a chance to kick the demon’s teeth in for neutering her? Not likely. Still Dean nodded and they made their way inside and straight toward the barkeeper.

“Hey,” Sam asked, “Have you seen our friend? Tiny, blonde, left with that Jake guy. Did she come back in?”

The grizzled man shook his head then scratched his beard and added, “But Andy said she was gonna check on her. Jake ain’t exactly good folks, ya know?”

He expected an answer, but Sam and Dean only exchanged dark glances. “You know where Andy lives?”

The man hesitated, obviously unwilling to tell two strange men where his waitress lived. A woman sitting at the bar seemed to have no such qualms. She popped her bubblegum in Sam’s face and supplied in a drunken drawl, “You lookin’ fer Andy? Girl’s gotten weird, I’m tellin’ ya. Moved outta her place and back t’ her parents’ old place a coupla months ago.”

“D’you know the address?” Sam didn’t even have to pull out the little-boy look. The woman was willing enough to talk. 

“Sure. Old farm, ‘bout five miles out on Lincoln Road. Can’t miss it, only place there is out there.”

Lonely, abandoned place, far from any neighbors. Jackpot. They were out of the door faster than the drunk chick could blink.

+

Buffy came to in a somewhat upright position, with men with drums dancing in her head. The last time she’d felt like this had been after the übervamp had dropped a wall on her after beating her into the ground. Even her _eyeballs_ hurt.

Carefully she tried to ignore the pounding in her head and took stock of her body. She was sitting on a rather uncomfortable chair. Her hands were bound with something cool and loose. Handcuffs. No chains, no miles and miles of tape or rope. Just a handcuff on each wrist, binding her to the chair’s arm rests. Her feet were free, unbound. 

Dismissed as no danger.

It was humiliating. 

At least she could think again, unlike before. What exactly had happened anyway? The last thing she remembered was talking to Andy who… crap. Andy, who had touched Dean while giving him her number and then checked Buffy over after her first run in with the chauvinist asshole that was Jake. 

Jake, who wasn’t the only one to have touched both of them after all. Just the one who was painfully obvious and bad at it. That meant Andy was the demon. And Andy had her tied up somewhere that was probably not a good place to be and she was going to die. Let’s hear it for bad plans!

She should have listened to Sam’s gut. Hell, she should have listened to her own gut. Anyone’s gut. But they’d been so fixated on the obvious choice for a host that they hadn’t even considered any other options. Sloppy. Sloppy, arrogant and stupid. 

To her right, Buffy could make out footsteps as someone entered the room. Okay. Here goes nothing.

“Hasn’t anyone ever told you,” she asked as she blinked open her eyes, “That you’re not supposed to let people with a concussion fall asleep?”

Andy – or rather, the Stealing Devil wearing her body – grinned, reddish eyes glinting in the low light of the room, which appeared to be an old living room, fallen into disrepair. Nice. And dusty. “Precious. All the punning and joking. You’re brave, little slayer.”

Buffy sent the demon the approximation of a bright smile. “I try.”

“Do you? I mean, there I am, middle o’ nowhere and who comes walking into my bar? The real, honest to God _Guardian_. And right behind you come the Winchester boys, one and two. First I thought I was as good as dead, but you just didn’t catch on, did you? Completely oblivious. Really, I expected better from _you_ of all people.”

Yeah, well, two weeks of sleep deprivation had apparently worn her down worse than she’d thought. She hadn’t felt anything that night, neither from Jake nor from Andy. Not the slightest blip on her radar. And all because she couldn’t sleep at night.

“I was having a bad day,” she defended herself weakly.

“Oh, no, sugar. You are _about _to have a bad day. Because, you see, I want your soul. It’s such a shiny, bright thing the likes of which hasn’t walked this world in two thousand years. And for me to get that, you need to sell it to me. Voluntarily.” At this point, the demon’s expression morphed into one of abject, bloody glee.__

__Buffy swallowed. She wasn’t sure how ‘tortured out of you’ could be considered ‘voluntary’ but she guessed demons weren’t that big on semantics. It wanted her soul, a soul that had been to heaven, had touched true grace, and it would get it. Over her dead body._ _

__She giggled to the rhythm of the pounding in her head. She was going to end up like a million other missing girls, her body left in a ditch, with nothing to prove she’d ever lived. She didn’t mind that so much, had always known she’d go out in obscurity. But the thought that she would go out without taking the fugly that killed her with her to hell, _that_ grated. _ _

__It was official. Buffy hated, goddamn _fucking_ hated being normal. And she was not going to go out like that._ _

__She straightened in the chair, flipped her hair out of her face as best she could without hands and glared at the thing inside Andy._ _

__“You want my soul?” she asked, a sliver of Faith and a chunk of Spike in her expression. “Then _come get it, bitch_.”_ _

__+_ _

__The silence in the car was too thick to cut with any old knife as they peeled out of the parking lot at full speed, leaving rubber and a wildly cussing Jake in their wake. The demon had Buffy. They had used her as bait, defenseless, weak, unsure of herself and out of her depth, had used her and then they’d _lost_ her._ _

__To Andy. Who had stroked a hand down Dean’s arm and touched Buffy after he had adjusted Jake’s jaw with his fist. Touched both of them, same as Jake. Better even. She had been subtle about it. How had they missed it? How could they have been so blind?_ _

__“We messed up,” Dean growled, gripping the steering wheel tight enough to turn his knuckles white, shooting down the street without the slightest regard for speed limits and other cars._ _

__“We were distracted,” Sam offered, but it sounded weak in both their ears. Distracted, yeah. By Dean’s car and Buffy’s disappeared power and self esteem. By worrying about each other’s feelings and crap like that. They paid too much attention to each other and too little to their surroundings, that was how they’d missed the demon in Andy’s body._ _

__Sam had his ESP stuff, Dean had a deal and a missing car, Buffy had nightmares and stolen powers and they all crushed on each other and fumbled like teenagers at times, stupid, blind and utterly oblivious._ _

__And now Buffy was going to get killed because of it._ _

__“We jumped the obvious lead and didn’t even consider anything else,” Dean kicked down the offered excuse. “That’s a goddamn rookie mistake, Sam. And rookie mistakes are something we don’t do.”_ _

__Silence as they left the welcome sign at the side of the road behind and started to look for the farm._ _

__“I think,” Sam ventured, hands on the shotgun in his lap, “That when this is over, we should talk.”_ _

__About their feelings._ _

__“Crap,” Dean cursed, but didn’t object._ _

__+_ _

__Buffy fought to keep back the tears like a brave little girl but there really wasn’t much she could do. Her nose was broken, she felt like her own blood was going to choke her and her whole face felt like someone had taken a hammer to it. Or maybe a demon’s fist._ _

__The tears weren’t expressions of fear as much as a simply bodily reaction to abject pain. But she really, really didn’t want the bitch to see them._ _

__“Awww,” the demon in the waitress’s body cooed, “Does that hurt? Would you like a minute to yourself?”_ _

__Buffy would have liked to answer, but her mouth was filled with blood from her nose and split lip and so she answered the only way she could. She spat on the demon, managing to hit it in the stomach as it turned away._ _

__She grinned at her success, well aware that her teeth were stained red and she probably looked like a horror movie reject. A bad one. But then, Giles had always admired her ability to use just about anything as a weapon, hadn’t he? She wondered what he’d think of projectile spitting._ _

__The demon ignored the blood with a scowl on Andy’s pretty face and leaned in close. Close enough to kiss or kill. The slayer fought the urge to bend backwards, away from it. It was bad enough that she was trapped like this. She sure as hell wasn’t going to play rabbit to the demon’s snake. Not as long as she breathed._ _

__The Take Away Devil smirked at her discomfort and moved sideways, burying its nose in her tangled hair, inhaling deeply. Gross. “You smell _so_ good,” it whispered right in her ear. “A soul like yours… it’s been two thousand years since I’ve smelled anything so good. So bright, so pure, little ray of sunshine, aren’t you?”_ _

__It pulled back, the almost gentle, hypnotic tone gone from its voice as abruptly as it had appeared, “And you don’t even know it, do you? You drag that pure soul around in the dirt and muck of this world, staining it with your brave little war. Come with me to hell and you could rule the place.”_ _

__That was its sales trick? Come with me to hell so your soul stays pure?_ _

__“I don’t think so.”_ _

__The Andy suit smirked and balled its hand to a fist. “Pity,” it decided with a smirk and landed the next blow._ _

__+_ _

__Fifteen minutes after leaving town, the farm still wasn’t in sight and both hunters were getting itchy, wondering whether the drunk woman’s estimation had been off or if they’d already passed the place and needed to turn around._ _

__Dean kept up an increasingly frantic mantra of, “Come on, come on, come on,” while Sam stared fixedly into the dark, looking for any sign of the place the demon had made its base. Both of them were very, very aware of time ticking by. More than half an hour had passed since the demon had gotten its hands on the slayer and the younger of the two brothers kept calculating possible scenarios in his head._ _

__If you knew the way and really stepped on it, you could probably reach that farm in fifteen minutes. That meant the demon had had Buffy far from any help for longer than that now. How much damage could a demon do in a quarter of an hour?_ _

__His mind shied away from the answer. He gripped the shotgun in his lap tighter and refocused on trying to see something on his side of the road without much success. He was about to suggest turning around when, behind a small copse of trees, something bright and rectangular caught his eye._ _

__A window. He was seeing a lit window. “Dean,” he almost yelled, jerking his arm to point at his find, “There!”_ _

__His brother didn’t look, he just hit the brakes and turned off the car’s headlights immediately. Sam hauled their weapons bag out of the backseat and jumped out of the car as soon as it ground to a halt on the shoulder of the road, closing the door as quietly as possible behind him. Dean was faster than him, already taking cover, eyes fixed on their target._ _

__At least it wasn’t set too far back from the road, meaning that they could reach it within a minute or two on foot. The Mustang rumbled almost as loudly as the Impala did, so there was no way they were driving up to the farm. The demon had Buffy. All they had was surprise and even that was questionable, because it had to know they’d realize who it was riding after crossing Jake off the list._ _

__They spent an agonizing thirty seconds scoping out the place, trying to make out movement or potential traps but finding nothing at first glance. “Fuck this,” Dean finally ground out and took off, keeping low to the ground. Sam shouldered the bag and followed as he always did, praying to every deity he knew and several he didn’t that they hadn’t gotten their friend killed with their dumb ass plan and lack of thinking._ _

__+_ _

__The demon was a talker. Big time. On the one hand, Buffy figured that was a good thing because every second it wasted talking was a second it wasn’t using her as a punching bag. On the other hand she was tempted to beg it to keep up the trashing she was receiving if only it would shut up, please._ _

__Why did villains always have to monologue? Why? And gloat. Let’s not forget the gloating._ _

__“Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve been up here? Centuries. Ages. And here I am, less than two months out of the pit and I got the juiciest piece of meat around landing smack on my plate. Someone’s smiling down on me, don’t you think?”_ _

__The Andy suit grinned and spun on its heel, walking over to what had once been a coffee table, trailing its fingers over the various fun toys laid out there. Knives were the most harmless of the bunch._ _

__“Souls aren’t what they used to be, you know? All that depravity. Everyone’s so jaded these days. It takes some serious work to throw people into utter despair so they’ll deal with me. Used to be, all you had to do was take a bit of money, maybe some heirloom. I got whole _towns_ simply by taking their relics from them. But now…The world’s not what it used to be.”_ _

__It trailed off, sighing dejectedly as it picked up a rusty fishing hook._ _

__Buffy tried not to stare at the thing too fixedly, opting to quip instead, “Neither’s nostalgia, is it?”_ _

__Her wit earned her a backhand across the face. Again. Wherever those boys were, they had better get with the saving. Because if they took much longer, there might not be all that much of her left to save._ _

__+_ _


	9. Eight

+

**Eight**

+

They reached the house quicker than Sam had estimated. Just in time, in fact, to hear a muffled cry that sounded like someone getting punched in the face. Both of them froze, guilt and wonderful, hot, burning anger tightening their hands around their weapons. 

Then they moved, very slowly and deliberately, away from the window behind which their friend was most likely getting tortured without the benefit of supernatural healing and toward the other side of the house where the demon was less likely to hear their entrance. 

Dean was pretty sure he’d never picked a lock so fast in his life and then they were inside, crouching behind broken furniture in what seemed to be an old kitchen. Sam closed the door behind them, grimacing at the slight squeak.

They both stopped as soon as the door was closed, listening intently for any sign that they had given themselves away. But all they could hear was the low drone of someone speaking in a room further to the right of the house. They waited another ten seconds or so, just to be sure, and then started to look around.

Dean checked the dusty counters and considered testing if the water worked. A few gallons of holy water might come in handy, especially if they could draw the fight into this room. But before he could try, his brother nudged him in the ribs with a low hiss, demanding attention.

He looked at Sam in the dark and found his gaze directed toward the center of the room, where a giant, ancient table sat. From his position crouched close to the floor it took him a second to make out what he was supposed to look at, but then he saw them and automatically straightened to get a better look.

“The hell,” he breathed, lower than a whisper as he stepped up to the table to take a closer look at the urns placed on it. There were four, all in all, rather small, made of clay and engraved with dozens of runes. Each urn was placed at the center of something vaguely resembling a Devil’s Trap, only way more complex. The patterns were engraved into the table and then filled in with something that might have been tar. It was impossible to tell in the dark. 

“You think…?” he asked Sam, not needing to finish his sentence. _You think these are the things the bitch stole?_

His little brother nodded and wriggled his fingers not too far from the nearest urn in its circle. “I can feel the magic. This isn’t just demon-powers, Dean, this is serious old school witchcraft.”

Great. A demon that happened to be a witch as well. Dean took that as yet another piece of evidence that fate just goddamn had it in for the Winchesters.

“Can we break it?” And give Buffy back her powers, let her beat the demon to mush, go home and watch TV?

Sam shook his head, frown etched onto his face. “No way, man. Way too powerful.”

Great. So they needed the damn demon to break its own spells. _Dear Take Away Devil, could you please give me back my car? Regards, Dean Winchester._

There were weeks when it was better just to stay in bed.

“Then what?” Dean asked himself as he looked around. There were two doors leading out of the room, aside from the one they had come in through. The one opposite the back door probably led to a hallway, the other one into a dining room. He’d seen enough old houses in his time to be pretty sure of that. Beyond the dining room was probably the living room, where Buffy and the demon were. Not very far, as far as carrying noises went. So they’d have to be very, very quiet. But maybe, if they barricaded one of the doors…

“Sammy,” he hissed, “Please tell me you brought those permanent markers.”

+

Buffy was breathing hard through her mouth, swallowing blood every other moment. Broken noses _sucked_. Not as much as broken arms, she had rapidly decided about five minutes ago, but damn if she wasn’t choking on her own blood. And puns weren’t half as funny if you sounded like you had a severe case of the sniffles.

Also, distracting herself from the pain with mental bitching about said pain was. Not. Working. 

Ouch. Ouch, ouch, ouch, she was never calling anyone a wimp again if they passed out from pain because without the slayer package to back her up things hurt a whole lot worse. 

“Say yes,” the demon hissed in her ear, for what had to be the hundredth time she’d woken, “Say yes and I’ll stop.”

“Die in a fire,” Buffy spat, trying to not seem as frazzled as she felt. 

The demon laughed as it backhanded her across the face - _again_ \- and then, like a flipped switch, just stopped. Stopped moving, stopped laughing, even stopped breathing. 

It tilted its head, listening to some invisible thing and Buffy felt her heart beat faster. The boys. Had to be. They’d found her. And the demon…

“So, how do those fake boobs work for ya?” she asked, obnoxiously loud, trying to cover whatever the demon was listening for. “Cuz I was thinking about getting some, you know? Latest trend in all the slutty places, or so I’m-“

This time she didn’t even see the hand coming, just felt a ring bite into her cheek and then tasted fresh blood as she bit her tongue viciously. Without her consent, a small whimper of pain escaped her. The demon smirked down at her, a single finger on its lips, before it slid backwards into the shadows until all that was left were its red eyes.

A moment later, the door leading further into the house was kicked open and Dean stormed in, guns blazing.

Buffy had a split second to take him in, shotgun in hand, face flushed from exertion and anger, eyes wide as he took in her new face-meet-wall-wall-meet-face look. Then the fugly in the waitress shot forward, out of the shadow, and although the hunter ducked at the last possible moment, a blow still grazed his shoulder, spinning him into a wall.

Sam. Where the hell was Sam?

“Hey!” Buffy yelled – as well as one can yell with a broken, bleeding nose – as the demon marched toward where Dean had landed, murder in its eyes. It ignored her effortlessly, not even hesitating for a single second as it bent down to pick Dean up.

He rolled, gripping his shotgun tightly to his body and came up a few feet from the incapacitated slayer, shooting. He hit the demon square in the ample chest, sending it tumbling backwards in a flurry of limbs and hisses.

Unfortunately, the salt didn’t keep it down long and Dean didn’t have time for anything more than a simple, “Okay?”

She grunted a confirmation she didn’t really feel and tried to find wiggle room in her handcuffs, almost screaming as she moved her broken arm. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Her mother would have washed her mouth out for cursing like this but her mother was dead and she was in goddamn fucking pain, fuck it all.

The demon came at the hunter again and they both crashed into the slayer, throwing her and her chair to the ground. This time she did scream as her arm was jarred. The two fighters tumbled across the floor, exchanging blows. The shot gun had skidded away into the dark corners of the room, useless.

Eventually, as was bound to happen when a human grappled with a demon, the fugly got the upper hand and slammed Dean into the wooden floor, hand on his neck, shit eating grin on its face.

“And now look here,” he jeered, “If it isn’t the Winchesters’ oldest.”

Dean glowered and attempted to buck it off to no avail. The demon pulled him up and slammed him back down. For a moment, he lay stunned, then a nasty smirk overcame his face. “That was easy, wasn’t it?” he asked with as much of a drawl as one could manage with someone crushing their windpipe.

Above him, the Take Away Devil stilled. Buffy held her breath. _Please, dear God, let him have a plan, or else we’re all dead meat._

“Where’s your brother, _Dean_?”

“Right now?” If possible, his smirk grew wider, “Taking apart your little mojo urns.”

The demon was up in a flash, its fist landing in his face as a farewell present before it took off down the hall like a shot. Dean watched it go before flopping down completely for a moment, just breathing. 

The silence was broken by a short, female scream followed by Sam’s whoop.

“Dean?”

“Yeah, princess?”

“Please tell me that was part of the plan?” Buffy demanded as her friend rolled painfully to his feet and came over to her, starting to fumble with her chains. After a moment he cursed quietly and started digging through his pockets for the handcuff key both Winchesters had taken to carrying with them at all times a long time ago.

He unlocked her wrists, trying to be gentle with her right one, which was so obviously broken it wasn’t even funny. And then her left one, which, while not broken, sported a serious case of road rash from when Jake had flung her around like a rag doll. “That needs to be set,” he observed as he helped her disentangle herself from the chair, helping her tuck her right arm against her torso.

“I’d rather just get my groove back,” she informed him, trying to sound flippant and failing spectacularly. If – when - she got her powers back, she could just have one of the boys set her arm and it would be healed by morning. 

Let’s hear it for mythical superpowers.

Dean shook his head at her and wrapped an arm around her waist to keep her steady as she tilted precariously within the first three steps away from the chair.

“Easy,” he told her as he steered her the way the demon had gone as fast as she could walk. “We still got a demon to exorcise.”

+

The plan, as Buffy found out as soon as they stepped into the hallway, wasn’t much of one. While Dean had gone to play decoy and bait, Sam had lain in wait, armed with a chair and a Devil’s Trap drawn hastily on the ceiling of the hall. 

Dean’s comment about Sam dealing with the urns had been enough incentive to draw the demon into the hall and send it tumbling right into the trap without thinking. 

Sometimes Buffy feared the day demons would finally wise up and actually think before acting. They’d have a way harder time doing their job if the demons weren’t arrogant to the point of blindness.

Sam had done the rest with the chair, braining the demon with it as soon as it had been trapped.

Simple, quick, brutal and beautiful. She knew there was a reason she loved those boys. 

Dean parked her against the wall close to his brother and walked right up to the edge of the Devil’s Trap, where the demon lay dazed and absolutely murderous.

“Whoops,” he said, deadpan, “Looks like I lied to you. Doesn’t that just make you angry?”

A snarl was his only response. 

“What, you got nothing to say?” Buffy sighed a bit. She was all for witty one-liners, but poking pissed off dragons with sticks the way Dean liked doing was a bit much. Or maybe that was just the pain and weakness speaking because she knew _why_ he was doing it all too well.

Walking the edge, playing with fire, just to prove you weren’t numb yet, to prove that you could do it, that you were still standing. Only Dean wasn’t, not really. He was the walking dead with ten months left to live and he _needed_ this semblance of control, of power. They let him have it.

The demon recovered from Sam’s attack surprisingly quickly and sat with its knees drawn to its chest in the middle of the Trap, looking out at them with cold, hellfire red eyes.

“Smart,” it drawled after a minutes of silence. “Real smart. Getting me to run out here. But there’s a problem, isn’t there?” It smirked. “You can’t actually break my spells, can you? And if you kill me, you’ll never get back what you lost. Just think about it- “

The thing inside Andy looked at Buffy, who was trying to use the wall to steady herself and regain some semblance of balance. For a moment, the two women stared at each other. “That shiny, bright soul of yours, totally unprotected. How long do you think you’ll make it? A week? Two? How long until hell finds you and rips you to shreds?”

“Well,” Sam interrupted the monologue, “We’re only human and we’re still kicking, aren’t we?”

The demon barked out a laugh, pointing at the youngest Winchester with one long, manicured finger. “Oh, sugar, you got _no_ idea what you got riding around with ya, do ya?”

Buffy tried not to glare mightily at the demon because that would be a dead giveaway that it knew something the boys did not. Hell, she wasn’t even really sure it actually knew anything. Maybe it was just trying to divide and conquer. Wouldn’t be the first time the bad guys tried that, after all. But the way it had talked before, about how her soul shone, made her pretty sure it knew _something_ and now was neither the time nor place to have an elaborate discussion about that. 

So instead of glaring, she shrugged and pushed off the wall, coming to a rather shaky halt next to Dean, who discreetly put a hand on the small of her back, steadying her. 

“You think you have us all figured out, don’t you?” she asked, just to change the subject. “You think you come up here and there we are, just waiting to be picked off by you, one by one. Someone smiling down on you, right? You have all these illusions of grandeur, as if anyone gives a shit what you do. You’re vermin to be exterminated, nothing more. You’re not an artist, you’re not a big, scary monster. You’re just a little demon with a grudge against mankind and you know what? _Not impressed._ ”

“Hallelujah,” Dean agreed, before digging into the inside pocket of his jacket and coming up with the Colt.

Buffy managed not to frown. The Colt was empty. They had no killing bullets left and hadn’t had since before they’d joined forces in Colorado. It was just one more reason to hit Bobby’s please sooner rather than later. There was a whole case of bullets waiting for them there.

He waved the gun in the demon’s face, obviously enjoying how it recoiled and hissed at the sight of Samuel Colt’s demon killing gun. 

“But you’re right,” Dean allowed as he crouched down so he was eyelevel with the thing. “We can’t break those spells.”

“But we can make you an offer,” Sam took over as he, too, stepped up to the circle.

“You tell us how to do it – “

“And you let me go? R-ight. Like I’ll believe that.”

“And we exorcise you. You don’t tell us, we got a very special bullet with your name on it right here.” Dean waved the Colt around a bit for clarification. Back to hell or permanently dead. The demon didn’t need to know that the second wasn’t even an option at the moment. 

Oh yeah, Buffy knew why she loved those boys alright. Handsome _and_ devious. 

For a very long minute, the Stealing Devil stared fixedly at the gun in the hunter’s hand. Then it inclined its head minutely and said, very lowly, “You know, I’ll be there. When you get downstairs, Dean Winchester, I’ll be waiting for you. And I’ll remember this little conversation. You can bet on that.”

Under his tough guy routine and bad boy act, the oldest Winchester paled. Enough so that Sam grabbed the Colt from his brother and aimed it at the demon’s head, cocking it. “The spells, bitch. Now.”

+


	10. Nine

+

**Nine**

+

“You got that all, boy king?” 

Sam glared from his position in front of the table containing the urns but nodded. Through the open door leading into the hall, the others watched him. He had gotten all the instructions the demon had given him. He was just trying to figure out if there was a trap included somewhere in it and he’d end up blowing them all up if he did the chant and runes as he’d been told to. 

“How do I know you’re not fucking with us?” he demanded after he’d rounded the table for the third time and not found any obvious booby traps labeled with big red warning signs. 

“You don’t,” the demon informed him amusedly, ostensibly reclining on its elbows inside the circle, watching the proceedings.

“Buffy?” Dean finally asked. He looked at her questioningly, head tilted to one side. Asking if she could help. Asking if her strange but useful instinctive knowledge of magic still worked. Part of her, part of the slayer or part of that other, the third side of her that he didn’t even know about.

She shrugged with her good shoulder and made her way over to Sam, not as steady as she would have liked, but walking and that was good enough. Once she reached him, she leaned into his side and he let her. Show of weakness, yes, but who cared? Grandstanding was for people who were good at standing. Which, right now, she totally wasn’t.

She shoved her inane thought processes aside and focused on the rune circles around the urns, one of which supposedly contained the missing pieces of her. She felt like she’d dropped into the Wizard of Oz. Question was, had she lost her brain or her heart? And where were the flying monkeys?

She looked at the runes, the constellations, the urns. Looked at the strange substance the lines were filled in with and the differences between the receptacles and the spell circles. She could feel the magic tingling just out of reach, just out of sight, invisible and intangible. She reached out with the part of her she that was blue summer skies and tried to grasp it, to wrap it around her fingers and pull. Bobby thought she’d studied magic to understand it the way she did, but that wasn’t it. She knew it because once upon a time, not so long ago, she’d been part of something much, much bigger than a few simple spells woven by a wannabe devil. 

She reached as far as she could, and felt the tendrils of magic, close and warm. They flowed, for lack of a better word, smoothly. No snares, no traps. Tainted, yes, but not with trickery. Straightforward magic.

“Alright,” she told the boys and breathed out deeply, noticing the demon’s surprised look. It thought it had taken everything from her. Just spent half an hour gloating about how special she was and didn’t expect this. Figured. 

She quirked an eyebrow at it, daring it to admit to its mistake. It looked away. The boys remained oblivious to the exchange, as well as its subject. She was madly grateful for that. There were a few things they didn’t need to know yet. Some things she didn’t want them to know. 

Sam nodded a few times, obviously with his mind elsewhere, mouthing the short chant he’d just learned to himself. The prospect of using magic taught by a demon didn’t sit too well with him. She didn’t wonder why as she returned to her post against the wall, some ten feet from the circle. She was useless and broken to bits – literally – but her eyes worked just fine, so she could keep watch at least.

Taking a deep breath, Sam rattled off the chant one, two, three times, watching with rising trepidation as first the circles and then the urns started to glow an unsettling dull red that reminded Buffy of lots of bad things. On the third repetition a low level hum started up, like a light bulb a few seconds shy of blowing and, as it turned out, the metaphor wasn’t half bad.

With a dozen words to go, the demon rolled to its feet with preternatural speed, edging as close to the table as it could within the circle. Buffy had a split second of thinking _crap_ when she saw its expression of glee and then the urns exploded in a shower of clay and magic, shooting shards of pottery everywhere. 

Four streaks of colored energy escaped, looking like cheap special effects. Two, a blue and a black silverish one shot straight into the ceiling. A third, less color than simply an impression of teeth and claws, shot into Buffy’s chest and filled her like an unfurling explosion, hot from head to toe. The fourth went straight for Dean, or so she thought through the pleasurable haze of having back her powers.

But the Impala, as much as he loved it, was not actually a part of him and so wouldn’t actually return _to_ him. Instead the streak bypassed him by a few inches and slammed into the trapped demon, rocking it on its heels.

It’s grin widened into a shit eating smirk of satisfaction.

The trap hadn’t been in the magic, but in the urns themselves. 

One day, she thought as her senses started going haywire and her systems all rebooted on the upgraded slayer version, she’d like to catch a break.

+

When a dark blur of whatever-the-fuck shot past Dean, he had two thoughts, one chasing the other with stunning speed. The first was one that was familiar by now whenever he was faced with a Devil’s Trap: _Bitch brought down the ceiling._

The second was, _too close!_

He didn’t bother running, simply flung himself forward, pushing away from the circle and the demon within with all his strength, hoping that is was enough, that he wouldn’t die tonight, not yet, Sammy still had so much to learn.

Vaguely he noticed Sam’s startled and then furious expression as he realized he’d been tricked. The demon hadn’t just stored parts of others, it had stored part of itself for just this occasion. A demon with a contingency plan. They were doomed. A few feet away, Buffy swayed and stumbled after she got hit by her own ‘stolen power’, landing on her butt when she finally overbalanced because of her broken arm.

Then the streak of dark power hit the demon’s chest with an audible noise that sounded a lot like _we’re all dead_ to the hunter’s ears, and one big, mighty _boom_ resounded in the old kitchen as the demon stomped its foot once – just once – and the floorboards in the hallway broke like matches, the crack running up the wall and into the ceiling, breaking the magic of the trap with the force of a small explosion. Dean felt the heat along his spine as he landed and rolled onto his back, aiming the Colt. It wasn’t going to kill any demon right now, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t loaded with some mean little suckers.

He fired off a shot without hesitation, on pure instinct, but the demon swayed to the side like the bullet came in slow motion and grinned at him, all teeth and cheap lipstick. He was definitely turned off the waitress type for a while.

With one big step, meant to show off the fact that it _could_ , the demon left the circle of the broken trap and zeroed in on Dean, as the closest and easiest target. Its heels clicked on the floor as it moved and damn if that sound didn’t annoy him about as much as the entire evening had.

Sam started forward and was – as always – flung into the nearest wall. Why could they never face down demons on wide, open fields? Why did it always have to be enclosed spaces with hard walls that had rusty nails and worse sticking out of them? And don’t even get him started on caves and tunnels. Getting slammed into concrete at thirty miles an hour _hurt_ now matter how much of a badass hunter you were.

He tried to get to his feet but had to settle for scrambling backwards as the demon advanced too fast for him to actually get up from the floor. To his left he could hear his brother curse loudly before his voice settled into a low, steady hum. 

Exorcism. At least one of them was thinking straight, Dean decided as he pushed himself backwards and aimed the Colt again only to have it kicked out of his hand by a powerful foot, its owner looming above him like doom in a cheap dress.

He cursed vilely as he kept scrambling backwards, keeping his gaze on the demon stalking him like he was a cutesy little mouse and it the big, fat cat. Six feet between them, then five, then four and he had no time to get to his feet and was running out of room to crawl backwards. Buffy was down and out of sight, Sam pinned to the wall like a butterfly, his chanting an angry buzz in Dean’s ear, keeping him from concentrating as much as the shards of clay in his hands and the dark, manic glee in the eyes of the thing hunting him.

Him! The hunter!

He growled, low and angry. Another foot closer and he was going to kick the bitch’s kneecap right out of its leg. See how it pulled off threatening with only one working leg. 

Three and a half feet and his back bumped into the leg of the big kitchen table and he veered off, trying to change direction and still looking for anything to give him that extra second he needed to stand.

Three feet. 

There was sound suddenly, to his right, through Sam’s chanting, sound and motion and then Buffy was there, between him and the Devil Trader, steadier than she’d been all evening.

Then several things happened at once. Buffy drew back her good arm for one hell of a punch, Sam’s exorcism finally took effect and the demon’s red eyes focused on him over the small slayer’s shoulder with an eerie concentration.

Sam shouted the last few words of Latin into the room and oily, dark smoke exploded out of the Andy’s mouth and nose just as Buffy’s punch landed, throwing the vessel backwards into the nearest wall.

Without the demon in it.

Sam hit the ground with a thump, greedily gulping down air, Dean finally rolled to his feet in a long overdue motion and Buffy, overbalanced because she’d expected a demon’s resistance, not a mortal woman’s defenseless flesh, fell, as the cloud of demon scum headed straight for the oldest Winchester, a banner of slick, disgusting evil about to jam itself down his throat.

The slayer kicked out on reflex as the cloud passed her by but aside from slightly scattering the formless demon, her attack was useless. Dean tried to move but found himself tangled in a broken chair, stumbling and almost falling into the table as Sam screamed, suddenly, loud and hard, a single word full of rage.

\+ 

“No!” he roared and flung out one arm, fire in his eyes at the thought of anyone, _anything_ taking his brother from him before it was time. Not now, not ever and certainly not to a cloud of black fucking smoke. He wouldn’t let it!

Inside of him, something pulsed and stretched, filling him beyond capacity, his veins his tissue, his mind and body and soul, before exploding outward through his hand, nothing but invisible, steel cold rage.

Flipped switches.

The demon stopped, writhing and coiling like an angry snake, but it stopped, right there, in mid-air, inches from Dean’s startled, sweaty face, and it was Sam, one hand outstretched, clenched into a tight fist, that held it there. 

His _will_ that held it there. 

Dean turned and met his brother’s eyes, wide and surprised, but not angry as Sam had expected. Relieved, mostly. The demon struggled harder and Sam, without conscious thought, squeezed his fist tighter, hissing as sweat broke out of every pore of his body and his heart rate went through the roof.

Buffy, the only one not frozen by what he’s just done, sat up and, tiredly but with finality, said the very last word of the exorcism, the one Sam had forgotten in sheer blind panic when the Take Away Devil had gone for his brother.

She said, “Amen.”

A screech like nails on a thousand chalkboards resounded in the old house, the walls shook and sparks shot everywhere as the demon was ripped back to hell. The energy, that mad power, left Sam as soon as the threat was gone and he slumped, too tired to do much more than grunt when Dean fell to his knees next to him and started checking him over.

He tasted something warm and sticky on his lips. Great. Nosebleed. He tried to smile at his brother through the blood to let him know he was alright, but that probably didn’t work out so well because Dean’s forehead creased and his movements became a bit more frantic.

Buffy was also there, suddenly, sitting down hard on Sam’s other side, leaning with her back against the wall. She had the Colt in hand but not aimed at anything. Precaution and the last remains of adrenaline speaking, not a real threat, Sam figured. The fight hadn’t lasted two minutes and adrenaline tended to keep you running a lot longer than that. 

The last thing he heard before everything became fuzzy and dark was the slayer’s sunny voice summing up the entirety of the past hour rather well.

“Ouch.”

+


	11. Ten

+

**Ten**

+

“You sure you’re okay, princess?” Dean asked, looking her over worriedly for the third time since they had finally worked up the energy to heave their tired carcasses off the floor a few minutes ago.

“Peachy keen,” she replied. Dean had used his shirt to make a make shift sling for her arm, tying the sleeves around her neck, using the back to rest her arm in. The buttons were digging into the place where the break was, but she wasn’t gonna complain because she was currently in slayer-healing heaven.

In all the years she’d been the slayer, she’d never noticed or found any mention of how the slayer’s powers dulled pain. Her arm hurt like a bitch, sure, but unlike before, she didn’t see stars every time she moved it.

The pain was there, but it was muted enough for her to function and her nose, set with cruel efficiency by yours truly, was already knitting back together. The road rash on her other arm was scabbed over, looking a days old, instead of an hour. Her balance, sense of direction, gut instinct, spidey-sense and general super-ness were back, too. Could she have a hallelujah please?

Now all they had to do was get Sam, the great unconscious lump up off the floor and into the ‘Stang so they could pick up the Impala and their stuff and be in another state before someone came to check out what the hell had happened to Andy, who, unfortunately, was dead and had been for a long time. 

“Good, then help me with this,” Dean requested as he started piling broken furniture under the broken Devil’s Trap. They’d all learned the hard way that leaving strange occult symbols behind at crime scenes was a bad idea. Very bad, in fact. Especially since two thirds of their trio had the FBI on their asses and were well known among law enforcement people as the crazy Satanist sons of bitches that liked to kill people for their nasty rituals. Or something along those lines. 

With a snort and a quiet headshake to herself she ran her hand through Sam’s hair one last time – should have made him Shaggy after all, not Scooby, with that hair - before grabbing the bottoms of the exploded urns off the table and carrying them over to the growing pile, keeping one ear on Sam’s heartbeat as she worked. 

+

Fifteen minutes later they had everything, including the chair and tools stained with the slayer’s blood, piled together and ready to burn. Dean went to siphon gas off Andy’s car while Buffy looked at her body critically for a long moment, before moving the dead woman closer to where the origin of the fire would be. She would have liked to move Andy outside, to pay some respect to the body of an innocent woman, but her own blood was all over the brunette. On her hands, under her nails, spattered on her clothes. 

She couldn’t afford to have someone find that. Dean came back as she finished crossing Andy’s arms over her chest and brushing her hair out of her still face and he kept his mouth shut as he doused everything with gas. 

They both returned to Sam’s side, managing to pull him to a semi standing position between them, most of his weight leaning on Buffy’s uninjured shoulder as Dean directed them out the kitchen door. He sat the bag they’d brought down at a safe distance from the house and left his two companions alone after a cursory glance to make sure Buffy wouldn’t drop his brother. Then he jogged back inside, setting everything on fire.

By the time the returned to where the others were waiting, Sammy was coming around and the old farm was burning like kindling, flames lashing out the windows and doors.

Wordlessly, Dean took over steering his brother while Buffy carried their stuff. As they hurried along, Sam took more and more of his own weight, making the others breathe silent sighs of relief because he wasn’t injured, just exhausted after using too much power keeping the demon away from his brother.

Exhaustion was still a bitch because they had to move two cars and Buffy couldn’t drive, but it was better than a concussion or something more serious. 

“Great trick, in there,” Buffy finally commented, mostly to keep her mind off the long hours they still had ahead of them now.

She sent Sam a quick smile when he looked at her, shrugging. “It was pure chance that it worked. I just got so…”

“Angry?” the slayer suggested, earning herself another nod. “Emotions make you strong. Nothing wrong with that.”

The tallest of the three hummed thoughtfully before Dean inserted himself into the conversation by asking, “So, no more Daphne?”

Buffy shook her head as she carefully clenched the hand of her broken arm, feeling tendons strain and bones shift before letting go again. “No. I thought normal meant peaceful, you know?” 

She didn’t look up as she spoke. “But that’s not it. Even without being the slayer, I can never have peaceful. Normal means weak. I’m not weak.”

She sped up her steps without another word, leaving the brothers to watch her go. She’d told the Scoobies she couldn’t be normal. That it was in her blood. But she’d thought… she’d thought that she’d accepted something she didn’t have a choice about anyway.

But that wasn’t it. She wasn’t accepting the inevitable by voluntarily fighting when everyone else was safe and sound in their Council compounds. She was making a choice. 

She wanted this, she knew now. She wanted, _needed_ to be strong. 

And strong meant slayer and so…

So Buffy Summers needed to be the slayer, now, forever and always.

+

Dean drove them back to the motel, nice and slow and under all speed limits. He parked the Mustang perfectly and exited it smoothly, as if nothing was wrong. Sam did the same and they both covered Buffy, who was dirty, bloody and looked like she’d gone several rounds with a brick wall and lost. Badly.

There was a minor break in their smooth act when Dean spotted the Impala right where he’d left it a few nights ago, as pristine and shiny as always, like it had never been gone. He made a sort of keening noise and was about to fling himself on the hood to hug his baby, when Sam lunged for him and pulled him back. A scene right now they did. Not. Need.

As soon as they were inside the room, they all burst into frantic action, Sam diving for the bags, Dean for a rag to wipe down the entire room and Buffy for her clothes strewn on the bed from her earlier – God, had it only been a few hours – styling session.

Promptly both boys stopped and Dean took a pair of jeans out of her hand with a stern look. “Bathroom,” he ordered curtly. “You gotta clean up.”

Buffy frowned, scowled mildly and then spun on her heel, taking back the jeans, along with a t-shirt and zip-up hoody before marching wordlessly into the bathroom. She didn’t like being ordered but she appreciated, more than she’d ever be able to tell, probably, that there was someone else to do the necessary things, to share the frenzy of packing and cleaning and getting the hell out of dodge with.

She stopped in the doorway and looked back over her shoulder to smile at Sam and Dean, who were both still standing where she’d left them, watching her go with mostly blank expressions on their faces. Maybe they already knew.

By the time she came back out of the bathroom, hastily scrubbed clean with a wet cloth and dressed in different – unbloody – clothes, their things were all neatly packed away and their bags stacked by the door. Dean was putting the finishing touches on the bedside tables, making sure they didn’t leave any fingerprints behind. No need to put up blaring red signs pointing toward them and the burning farm a few miles away.

Of course wiping down the whole room was suspicious in itself, but better than finding their faces in the six o’clock news. Again. 

Sam motioned her over to the chairs, first aid kit sitting at his elbow. Dean meanwhile disappeared into the bathroom to erase them there, too. Her makeshift sling was untied and folded up before he gently took her right arm in his big hands and turned it over, trying to figure out if the break was clean.

It hadn’t been. But she’d fixed it while he’d still been out cold and Dean had fussed over him and they didn’t have to know that. They worried enough. She got a new sling once he was finished with his inspection. There was no need to bandage or even splint an arm that would be healed within twelve hours.

The first time she’d gotten hurt after joining the brothers on their endless road trip they’d both yelled at her for being careless with her body, right up until the moment they’d watched her skin literally knit back together in front of their eyes. Since then, they tended to defer to her knowledge of her own healing when it came to patching her up.

Sam offered her painkillers, out of courtesy only. They both knew she wasn’t going to take them because they’d make her tired and they couldn’t afford that. Dean came back from the bathroom armed with energy bars and caffeine pills, the latter of which he jammed down his brother’s throat despite his protests.

Half an hour ago, Sam had been unconscious because of exhaustion and now he had at least a three hour drive before him. After that minor disagreement, which was settled by Dean glaring mightily and pulling the big-brother-knows-best card, they ate their energy bars, flushed them down and got moving.

There was some grumbling, of course, about how Dean wanted to drive the Impala, because he’d _missed his baby, damnit!_. He got shot down instantly by his brother, who dared use _logic_ , which seemed to piss the older of the two off even more. Buffy fondly patted the child’s drawing on the wall next to the door in farewell and followed the bickering men outside.

Then they were back on the road, Sam in front, Dean and Buffy behind him, leaving behind Dominion, headed for the state line. They’d leave the state, spend the day sleeping the night off in a motel and then separate to double back to Bobby’s in the evening, hopefully losing anyone that managed to track them. Read: Henriksen and his FBI buddies.

“Dean?” she asked as they took a turn onto the highway.

“Yeah?”

“I never used to get into this much trouble on my own.”

He snorted and pointed out, without taking his eyes off the road, “You got into the Nightmare on your own.”

She grinned and shifted so she could look at him, her arm held carefully in front of her stomach. “I like to think that was you guys getting me retroactively into trouble.”

“Admit it,” he teased, “You love it.”

Getting into trouble, running for her life, getting flung around, disempowered, beaten and broken and getting back up and hitting and punching and kicking and _being strong_? 

She wasn’t Daphne and she never would be again and now, here, after the past couple of days, she could say and really, truly mean it: She was glad.

“Yeah. I do,” she admitted and closed her eyes.

+

It was early morning by the time they found a motel and Sam veered off to park the Impala somewhere inconspicuous, much to Dean’s dismay. Buffy stayed in the car while the oldest of them went to get them a room.

He smiled at the girl behind the desk and asked for a double. Not letting anyone know there were three of them was important and if he got two singles, the others would just bitch about sleeping arrangements endlessly. The girl nodded and checked him in quickly, handing over the key within minutes.

“You alright?” she asked, as he was about to leave, taking in his rumpled appearance. He wasn’t bloody, but neither he nor Sam had gotten out of the fight in pristine condition. 

He gave her his brightest conman smile and shrugged. “I’m okay. Just been a busy twenty-four hours. My fiancé almost managed to get herself killed in a riding accident.” He rolled his eyes and added, for good measure, “She’s a city girl, ya know?”

The girl giggled and nodded. He left.

Outside the sun shone too bright for his been-awake-all-night headache and he squinted against the light as he figured out the room numbers and got back into the Mustang to park it in the right space. Then he ostensibly helped Buffy out of the car, carrying their bags inside after her. 

They waited ten minutes, then Buffy called Sam to give him the room number and let him know the coast was clear. He arrived a few minutes later, immediately handing the car keys to his brother and damned if Dean didn’t cuddle them to his chest and coo, just the tiniest little bit. 

Sam called dibs on the shower and since he looked like he was about to drop dead from exhaustion, no-one complained for once. Ten minutes later he was lying in bed, hair still wet, just about asleep. 

Dean went next and then peered out of the bathroom wearing only boxers, asking the slayer, “You need help with your hair?”

Buffy looked first at her arm and then at a strand of hair that hung sadly in front of her face, limp and still slightly bloodstained. She’d brushed most of the stuff out, but blood was blood and it stuck like glue once it dried. She grimaced. No way she was sleeping with that on her head. 

Still, letting Dean into the shower with her was a bad idea. A very, very bad idea. It would lead to one thing and then another and… bad idea.

She shook her head and fought a yawn. “There’s still hot water left?” 

He nodded. “Then I’ll be fine. I’ve been worse and still gotten clean.”

Getting beat on by the Turok’han came to mind, as well as half a dozen more recent occasions when she’d been bleeding, hurting and alone in a motel room with no-one to even offer help.

“But I can call if I get stuck, right?” she asked belatedly, getting a soft smile and a nod in return. 

“Good.” She stepped around Dean into the steamy room and quickly stripped off her clothes and got in the shower, letting the hot water do most of the work. By the time she was done, every muscle in her body felt like jelly with a core of mush and she barely managed to slip into an old pair of boxer shorts that had once belonged to Xander and a ratty tank top before she crawled over Sam and into bed. 

She fell asleep without even drawing up the covers properly, thinking, as she grew woozy and soft around the edges, that one good thing had come out of the whole mess:

She slept again without nightmares, if only because she was too damn exhausted to even dream anymore.

+


	12. Eleven

+

**Eleven**

+

Twelve hours later all three hunters were moderately well rested, fed and mostly healed up. They had talked about Sam’s amazing mind-feat over a very, very late lunch – the sun was already setting – and come to the conclusion that, as soon as they hit Bobby’s, they would have to try and figure out if it was another fluke, or if his control was actually getting better.

The youngest Winchester cheered at the thought of graduating from M&Ms to something larger, say, a knife, but didn’t get his hopes up. After all, like the very first time, Dean’s life had been in danger the night before and that tended to set all kinds of reserves loose in him.

They’d see. 

After eating they’d obsessively watched the news for almost an hour and breathed careful sighs of relief when they had found no mention of themselves or any suspects. Andy’s face was plastered across every screen, but the police seemed to have only the vaguest of leads on a guy who went by the name of Jake and had tried to molest a blonde – as of yet unidentified woman – the night before. Andrea Warren had saved the woman and disappeared shortly after to be found dead in her burned down home. They knew no more than that and were asking for any new leads.

Good for them. 

Now they were all back on the bed, lying like sardines in the can, flat on their backs, arms at their sides, shoulders bumping, staring straight at the ceiling and trying not to be the first to start the conversation they all knew they needed to have. Buffy’s arm was healed, the sling hanging on the door knob as a reminder to put it back on when they left.

“We need to talk about this,” Sam finally told the ceiling, after the silence had long since gotten awkward. 

“Do we?” Dean asked in a last ditch effort to escape the conversation.

“We do,” Buffy agreed, sounding mightily reluctant.

“I don’t want to,” Dean whined.

“Dude, we almost got killed because we got sloppy because…,” Sam waved one and wildly to encompass all three of them and maybe their entire lives. 

“We’re all making googly-eyes at each other,” Buffy finished.

“I don’t do ‘googly-eyes’, princess.”

“Yeah, you do and you know it,” Sam corrected without heat. “We all do. And we can’t keep doing that.”

“So what do we do?” the oldest demanded, obviously wanting to get this conversation over and done with as quickly as possible. He didn’t like talking about his emotions and sorting out who crushed on who with his brother and the object of said crushing as very high on his top ten list of ways not to spend the afternoon. Right after jumping off a cliff and poking himself in the eye, actually. Well, maybe before the eye. The eye would heal. He wasn’t so sure he’d ever get over the trauma of this talk.

“I can leave,” Buffy suggested, only to be immediately shot down by two almost identical grunts of disagreement.

“Don’t be stupid,” Sam told her. “You’re not leaving.”

“Then what?”

“Erm…,” Sam started again, since Dean had obviously decided to weather this talk with as much stoic silence as he could. He sat up and looked at Buffy with a quizzical expression before opening his mouth, closing it again and lying back down. 

The ceiling was fascinating.

“If you were gonna suggest I hook up with your brother because he’s going to hell and deserves some fun, I’m gonna bust your knee caps, mister.”

Sam swallowed.

“You know,” the blonde suggested after another minute of silence, “We could just agree to ignore whatever this is and be friends.”

“Friends who sleep in each others’ beds?”

“Yep.”

“Ain’t gonna work,” Dean refuted, still studying the ceiling.

“Of course,” Buffy added, “We could also just have very hot, incest-y threesome sex and be done with it.” She sighed dreamily as Sam made a noise like a strangled cat and Dean honest-to-God gagged.

“Exactly,” she concluded.

“God… can you… gah!” Dean hit his temple with the heel of his palm, trying to grind the images in his brain to powder and apparently not succeeding, if his grimace was anything to go by.

“Buffy!” Sam whined.

“Look,” the slayer sat up, looking at them both in turn. “I like this, okay? I like having you at my back, I like knowing there’s someone that’s gonna bail me out if I get into trouble. I like that there’s someone who gets what it’s all about, who mocks crappy diner food with me and talks weapons and patches me up. I like that there’s someone to talk to because this job can get pretty lonely and I know you’re about to have an aneurism from chick-flicky-ness, Dean, but I like having you two around. As friends. So I think you’re both hot and I know you think the same about me because, hello, predator here, I know when someone’s watching me and can we please, please not ruin this? Can we just be friends who sleep in each others’ beds and save each others’ lives and do this crazy monster killing road trip thing together? We agree to leave the whole attraction thing alone and stop being stupid around each other and make this work. Please?”

Behind her back, the brothers looked at each other, both well aware that you couldn’t just switch off attraction. But then Dean shrugged because what it came down to was this: They both did stupid things when the other was in trouble and while including a third in that equation maybe meant more stupid things, it also meant one more person to help get them out of trouble and that’s what they did. They looked after each other and so far, they were alive. 

Dean had sent their father away once, because he thought they were weak when they were together. He’d learned, within a few months, how wrong he was. And yes, he knew that in this comparison he was lumping a woman he’d known for only a few weeks in with his own father, but who cared? He had less than a year to live so he could do as he damn well pleased and if there was someone he could trust to look after Sammy once he was gone, all the better.

So, yeah. End of story.

“On one condition,” he informed Buffy.

“Yeah?”

“You never ever, ever mention incest-y threesome sex again. Ever.”

Buffy’s smile could have probably lit up a small Midwestern town or two.

+

As soon as the conversation was declared over, all three of them put as much distance between them as they could. Sam fled into the bathroom, Buffy into the far corner with a cheap romance novel and Dean went to inspect his baby.

At full dark they packed their things and got ready to go. They were finally making it to Bobby’s place, come hell or high water or the damn apocalypse.

Buffy, who seemed mostly bemused by the boys’ insistence on getting there fast – she’d never had to face Bobby’s wrath head on because she was a week late for a check-in – quietly sung under her breath, “We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz.”

Dean immediately raised his hand and called dibs on the lion.

“The cowardly one, you mean?” Sam teased.

“He only thinks he’s a coward. In reality, he’s brave as can be,” Buffy pointed out.

“Suck-up,” Sam accused, flicking a pair of socks at his broadly grinning brother.

“Don’t worry, Sammy,” Dean said as he caught the missile out of mid-air. “You can be Toto.”

Sam harrumphed mightily. “First Scooby and now Toto?”

His brother nodded sagely.

“Why do I always have to be the dog?”

Dean barked, Buffy laughed. “It’s the eyes, Sam. Big, cute, adorable dog eyes. 

Sam considered feeling insulted when his own socks hit him in the forehead, returned by his dear brother, and then decided against it and pouted instead.

+

+

The End

+

**Author's Note:**

> [My tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/wordsformurder) is now open for fandom business. Come visit.


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